It took 140 years for a religious community devoted to serving African-American Catholics to name a black priest as its leader.
He is the Rev. William Norvel, 76, a native of Mississippi, who was contemplating retirement before being chosen the 13th superior general of the Josephite Priests and Brothers.
“It is about time,” Deacon Al Turner, director of the Office of Black Catholics for the Washington Archdiocese, told Hamil R. Harris of The Washington Post.
There are three million African-American Catholics — by any measure a significant number of Christians to be served, but fewer than 4 percent of the 77 million Catholics in America.
Turner acknowledged that African-American Catholics “suffer from invisibility” in the church.
The typical black congregation in America is Protestant.
The Josephites were founded in Belgium in 1817 with the specific mission of serving young people.
They still sponsor schools and serve parishes and college students.
The first black Catholic church was founded in Baltimore in 1793, long before enslaved blacks were emancipated.
Originally, Maryland, the Free State, attracted free men and women of color from the Caribbean.
The American Josephites are still headquartered in Baltimore but have a worldwide mission.
Norvel spent five years in Nigeria successfully recruiting African seminarians to come to the U.S. to serve African-American Catholics.
If you lived through the 1960s and 1970s, you may be familiar with the American peace activist Philip Berrigan, who was a Josephite priest for 18 years.
His younger brother Daniel, a poet, became a Jesuit priest.
Together, they pursued nonviolent public protests against the Vietnam War.
Depending on your politics, you will look upon the Berrigan brothers as either famous or infamous.
It was as a Josephite that Philip became active in the civil-rights movement, marching for desegregation and participating in sit-ins and bus boycotts.
For a time the Berrigan brothers were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for acts of vandalism, including destruction of government property.
In 1967, as a member of the so-called “Baltimore Four,” Philip Berrigan poured their blood on Selective Service records in the Baltimore Customs House.
He was sentenced to six years in prison, but released on bail the following year.
In 1968, as a member of the so-called “Catonsville Nine,” he walked into the draft board of Catonsville, Md., removed draft records, and burned them in a lot outside the building.
Afterward, while he was staying at the rectory of the Church of St. Gregory the Great on New York City’s Upper West Side, the FBI broke down the church’s door to arrest him.
He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.
Over his lifetime he spent 11 years in jails and prisons for civil disobedience in the quest for peace. He died of cancer in 2002, age 79.
The Josephites’ new leader is a quieter peacemaker.
As incoming pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help church in the nation’s capital, he ended a rebellion of black parishioners who had publicly defied the Washington Archdiocese and called the previous white pastor a dictator and a bigot.
“There was a lack of unity in the parish and unrest,” Norvel told The Washington Post, “but they sent me here to bring peace.”
David Yount answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount31@Verizon.net.