DAYTON, Ohio -- Black Americans have 'come of age' in the Catholic Church, according to participants in a national Catholic conference.
The pope's visit to the United States in September, when he met separately with the nation's black bishops, gave weight to the separate identity of blacks within the church, said Patricia Feistritzer, a spokeswoman for the National Catholic Educational Association.
And the church May 5 installed its first black archbishop in the United States when Auxiliary Bishop Eugene A. Marino of Washington was given his own archdiocese in Atlanta.
'He was given a lot of control and responsibility to direct his archdiocese in ways that the black community has been wanting,' Feistritzer said. 'There's a very definite feeling that the black American has come of age in the church.'
Beverly Carroll, director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' office of black Catholics, said black and Hispanic members 'will be the dominant cultures of the 21st century in the American Catholic Church.'
Carroll and Feistriter are part of symposium that drew about 300 Catholic leaders to a weeklong conference in Dayton on the church's educational mission in coming years.
The educators are sizing up what the Catholic Church can offer its increasing number of black members.
There are 1.3 million black Catholics in the United States, compared with 900,000 in 1985, Carroll said. In addition, there are 800,000 Haitians 'who would align themselves with the black community,' she said.
Parochial schools and ways of worshiping should reflect the cultural shift, she said.
'What our delegates are feeling is the need to be sure that the cultural diversity aspect is in the very fiber of all that we're talking about today, and not (have it) treated as an isolated subject,' Carroll said Tuesday.
Parochial schools need across-the-board appraisals to make sure they are not teaching only 'dominant culture' values, and curriculum, textbooks, and the racial composition of faculty and school boards should reflect minority membership in the church, she said.
With adequate resources, the number of black parochial school students could be doubled, according to Carroll. She said the challenge to church leaders is finding ways to fund Catholic education for low-income families.
Many black Americans are not aligned with any church and there is fertile ground for an approach by the Catholic Church, Carroll said.
