Our polarized politics in the United States has featured Catholics who call on their bishops or the pope to censure or excommunicate politicians who practice the same faith but hold political views that advocate for policies contrary to official Catholic teaching. Usually, Catholics center their calls on those politicians whose views contradict Church teaching on human reproduction and sexuality and not other, binding teachings like those found in Catholic Social Teaching. On the other hand, there are growing calls for censuring or excommunicating Catholics who hold office in the Trump administration, and those calls center around administration policies that contradict aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, such as immigration, just war, and aid to the poor. This post does not address that debate, but to ask a basic question. Is there, in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, an example of a Catholic politician being excommunicated over their political stances which can establish a precedent? Such an example occurred in New Orleans in 1962, when a powerful local machine politician with statewide and regional influence was excommunicated, along with two political allies, by an archbishop.
On April 16, 1962 at 5:45pm, the Right Reverend Monsignor Joseph Pyzikiewicz appeared at the residence of Una and Bernard Gaillot. The timing of his visit was impeccable. The Gaillots had their television on and tuned to the local news where Monsignor Charles J. Plauche, the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, was reading a decree of the excommunication of Una Gaillot (identified by the media as Mrs. B.J. Gaillot) from the Catholic Church. Monsignor Pyzikiewicz, visiting in the name of Archbishop Joseph Rummel and Auxiliary Bishop John Cody, had come to physically hand the notice of excommunication to Mrs. Gaillot. Pyzikiewicz reported the exchange as being cordial and polite, with the only resistance being Gaillot’s insistence that her opposition to Rummel’s decision to desegregate archdiocesan Catholic schools and his and his brother bishops’ teaching on racism and race relations was based on her understanding of the Bible, papal pronouncements, and the writings of Catholic scholars. The visit ended with Pyzikiewicz pleading with Gaillot to pray for Divine guidance, to repent for her views, and with his offer to help her to do so.
Joining Gaillot in receiving this canonical penalty was another layperson, Jackson G. Ricau. Both persons were leaders of self-identified “citizen groups” who opposed desegregation of any kind. The third person was one the most powerful local politicians in U.S. history, Judge Leander Perez. He was the political boss of Plaquemines Parish (counties in Louisiana are called parishes, a French and Spanish colonial legacy) and wielded statewide influence. Now, one could easily be forgiven when reading this chapter of U.S. Catholic history that the reason Gaillot, Perez, and Ricau were excommunicated was for their dissent against official Catholic Church teaching on racism as pronounced by Archbishop Rummel and his brother bishops in Louisiana and the United States. However, my research in the archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans revealed that the grounds for excommunication were much narrower, though still intimately related to Church teaching on race. Excommunication was not triggered by those three Catholics holding racist views or being public with those views in contradiction with their archbishop. It was the step they took after that which proved to be a bridge too far for Rummel and Cody.
Archbishop Joseph Rummel’s campaign against racism and to desegregate the Catholic schools of south Louisiana was an attempt to correct a historic injustice. New Orleans under French and Spanish rule had racially integrated parishes, though the schools were segregated. With the Louisiana Purchase and the gradual Americanization of New Orleans, the habits of segregation in the United States began to seep into the life of the Church there. Archbishop Francis Janssens, a Belgian sent in 1888 to pastor one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse local churches in the country, was part of a larger effort by the U.S. bishops to bring order to a rapidly growing church, where the different immigrant groups usually did not get along. New Orleans was different. Not only was it a racially mixed diocese, it was also a diocese where, up until the early 20th century, English was the fourth language spoken after French, Spanish and German. New Orleans found itself caught in a national policy of segregating parishes on ethnic or national grounds, and that meant, for New Orleans, on racial grounds, too. The establishment of a “black persons only” parish, despite the fact that black Catholics could continue to worship in their original parishes, touched off protests against Janssens because he was setting a precedent that would lead to the segregation of the Church. The six decades of New Orleans Catholic Church life that followed Janssens would prove his critics right.
Rummel faced a segregated archdiocese. The daily racism practiced by many local Catholics like Gaillot, Ricau, and Perez extended to the smallest aspects of Catholic devotional life. For instance, in a telegram dated December 14, 1962, Gaillot requested of Bishop Cody that he order that black and brown men be removed from all Nativity creches across the archdiocese because, she argued, there was no evidence in the Bible that the Magi were persons of color. Alongside this correspondence were others that reflected more the ugly racial stereotypes and racist rhetoric of the time. The shopworn mythologies about black people possessing disease to being intrinsically predisposed to crime abound in these documents. One letter writer went so far to claim that black Africans ate their Italian ancestors. Ironic, given that southern Italians in New Orleans, because of their darker complexion, got caught up in those same social and ecclesial forces which segregated the archdiocese. William F. Buckley, on an April 15, 1968 episode of Firing Line found Perez’s own attempts to argue why he was not a segregationist so egregiously false that he declared to Perez, perhaps as a backhanded swipe against his being a boss, that “you don’t have sovereign power over the English language.”
Rummel’s theological corrective was explicitly centered on those same theological themes that Catholics employed to oppose Janssens over a half-century prior: that the Church is the Body of Christ and that black Catholics, like any other persons, were made in God’s image and likeness. Consequently, no person can be barred from or limited in any way from accessing and receiving the ministry and sacraments of the Church, including its schools.
Against this straightforward theology, local Catholics like Gaillot, Ricau, and Perez employed their arguments, which amounted to a privatized faith practiced all-too-much by U.S. Catholics and Protestants even today, ideological accusations leveled against Rummel and Cody, and legal arguments. For example, on February 7, 1961, Gaillot was interviewed by a panel of New Orleans journalists on the WYES-TV show “Working Press.” She found herself making contradictory claims that her private reading of the Bible supported her arguments about race, while falsely claiming that Church leaders did not read the Scriptures accurately, nor did they contradict segregationists on race, all while claiming too that she was not denying the authority of bishops to make definitive interpretations of Scripture for all Catholics. Perez would support the Catholic Church in Plaquemines when it supported his status quo. Against Rummel, Perez would claim that he was “a Catholic but not an archbishop’s Catholic” and a “mother-at-the-knee” Catholic. Catholic segregationists would accuse Rummel and his allies of being Communists because desegregation was viewed as something forced upon them by authorities outside of Louisiana without their consent and was a social leveler between white and black people.
The bridge too far for Rummel was when segregationists, led by Gaillot, Perez, and Ricau attempted through their citizens’ groups to rally local Catholics into organized resistance that also supported legal actions against the Church, the latter effort led by Perez himself. A March 30, 1962 Citizens Council Meeting in Plaquemines Parish featured Perez calling on Catholics to stop donating to their local parishes and pull their children out of parochial schools. He threatened to cut off the utilities to Catholic institutions in his parish. Perez and his allies lobbied the Louisiana State Legislature, who considered no fewer than three bills that ranged from denying aid to Catholic schools, such as the provision of taxpayer paid textbooks provided to all Louisiana schools public and private, to the placing of Catholic schools under the direct control of the state.
Gaillot, Perez, and Ricau were not excommunicated on the grounds of holding publicly racist views, nor their public opposition to Archbishop Rummel’s teachings on race and his order to desegregate Catholic schools. If that were the case, then, as the correspondence Rummel and Cody received showed, a good number of laypersons and perhaps many priests of the Archdiocese of New Orleans would have been excommunicated. What got Gaillot and Ricau excommunicated was their calling their fellow Catholics to organize a resistance group that not 0nly openly rejected the teaching authority of the local bishop on race, but also sought to defeat his efforts to integrate the local Church. They allied themselves with Perez, who earned excommunication not only for joining Gaillot and Ricau’s call for organized resistance and defiance, but also for his attempt to bring the power of Plaquemines Parish’s civil society and government as well as the government of the State of Louisiana to bear against the Archdiocese of New Orleans that culminated in his threat of a state takeover of Catholic schools.
These challenges to the hierarchy, including the charges of them being in error, misguided, and even corrupted by ideas, ideologies, and social and political forces alien to Catholics, demonstrate that the tactic used by some U.S. Catholics today to attempt to discredit bishops for using their legitimate teaching authority on faith and morals is not new. There is a direct line that can be drawn from the efforts by Gaillot, Perez, and Ricau against Archbishop Rummel to similar efforts by those in the Catholic blogosphere who launch similar invective against the bishops, most recently on immigration.
Since the events of 1962, the closest a bishop has come to the precedent set by Rummel was Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, who in March 1996 imposed automatic excommunication on members of his diocese who were members of Call to Action, Freemason Organizations, Planned Parenthood, the Hemlock Society, and the Society of Saint Pius X. This decision was upheld by the Congregation of Bishops. Unlike New Orleans, the events in Lincoln were targeted against neither individual Catholics nor Catholic politicians engaged in an organized civil and political resistance against their bishop.
Here, then, is the example set by the Catholic Church in the United States to date on when a Catholic politician should be excommunicated. It is when that person attempts to rally their fellow Catholics in an organized manner to openly defy and resist their bishops when they are enforcing Catholic teaching and when they seek to directly apply the power of the state to prevent the Church from performing its ministry. Today, when Catholics debate the wisdom and appropriateness of ecclesial sanctions against U.S. Catholic politicians, and that discussion turns to the possibility of excommunication, this is the sole precedent they can work with. It is a very high bar to reach, indeed.
Sources
Bentley Anderson, Black White and Catholic, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans.
William F. Buckley, Jr., Firing Line, The Wallace Movement, recorded on April 15 1968. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUbjUXsX0n4&t=936s
Gilbert C. Din, The Canary Islanders of Louisiana, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1988.
William C. Havard, Rudolf Heberle, and Perry H. Howard, The Louisiana Elections of 1960. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Studies, 1963.
Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez, Boss of the Delta, 2nd edition, Lafayette, LA.: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1977.