Catholic Churches Work for Common Ground

Near the end of Mass at Christ the King Catholic Church, the gospel choir clapped and swayed as they sang songs from the African-American Catholic hymnal.

A mile away at St. Mary's Catholic Church, the soloist's voice seemed to reach the top of the soaring vaulted ceiling as parishioners knelt in prayer.

"We recognize the individuality of the two," said the Rev. Ricardo Phipps, pastor of both churches. "But for the most part our concerns, our interests and our hopes are really basically the same."

Founded during the segregated 1940s, Christ the King and St. Mary's once served two communities: one black, one white.

But these days, white worshippers comfortably sit among the mostly black parishioners at Christ the King, and the once all-white St. Mary's attracts a multicultural congregation.

That's because both congregations have worked in recent years to erode the racial barriers that once separated the two bodies of believers.

The two churches now call themselves the Catholic Community of West Jackson. They share a priest, hold joint religious education classes and earlier this year consolidated their church offices at Christ the King.

But Phipps stopped short of calling the cooperative effort a merger. Rather, he said, it's a step toward living like God wants us to - as one.

"We're not trying to necessarily undo history," he said. "There are two buildings there."

Christ the King was founded in 1945 to serve the burgeoning African-American community around Lynch Street.

Three years later, St. Mary's emerged as a parish for the growing number of Catholics, many with Lebanese, Italian and Irish heritage, who settled in a nearby west Jackson neighborhood.

The churches didn't have much to do with one another until the 1960s, when the first black child enrolled at St. Mary's elementary school.

"There was a lot of discord during school integration," said Clarence Hunter, a longtime St. Mary's member who has studied the church's history. "There were people at Christ the King who felt that people at St. Mary's were trying to keep their children out of school."

But as the neighborhood around St. Mary's shifted from mostly white to predominantly black, church membership also diversified.

Hunter, who is African American and works as the curator of the Tougaloo College Civil Rights Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, joined St. Mary's when he moved to the area in 1984 because he wanted to be part of a multiethnic parish.

When he first attended the church, blacks made up about 5 percent of the congregation, which at the time numbered about 300 to 400 families.

Today the congregation has dwindled to about 100 English-speaking families, but blacks and whites attend in almost equal numbers. The church also includes a number of Indians, Nigerians and enough Latinos to warrant a weekly Spanish-language Mass.

Though membership at St. Mary's has dropped, Hunter considers the church, which will celebrate its 60th anniversary next weekend, in a period of revival.

"Going forward is a real opportunity to really live the teachings of Christ," he said. "You're in a very, very poor area. I don't think the city recognizes the poverty and the decay that's in that area. I see the church standing out as taking a role in the development of a community under the teachings of Christ."