The mass begins in an explosion of sound and color: The beat of African drums, the smell of African incense and the clapping of a packed congregation accompany the opening procession of Archbishop George Augustus Stallings and his co-celebrants in gold vestments and a choir garbed in bright red and black.
The singing is gospel-jazz, its rhythms a far cry from the sedate Wesleyan or Mary hymns of white Protestant and Catholic churches. While the church’s atmosphere and mission are clearly Afrocentric, its bulletin states that its members are “fully committed to sharing (God’s) word, work, witness, and strength with all of humanity by living and moving with love and kindness.”
The physically and vocally powerful Stallings bases his sermon on the day’s gospel about the wedding feast at Cana, where Jesus performed his first miracle, at his mother’s request, by changing water into wine when the wine ran out.
Mary, Jesus’ mother, is described by Stallings as “a woman of color” who knew-as “black folks” do-that “you can’t run a good party and let the liquor run out.” Whites and Europeans, he reminds the congregation, are “oppressive in telling us how to live and celebrate,” and they “have to be different when they go to church.
“African-Americans, however, see life in one seamless garment,” he says in a voice that could rock the Hollywood Bowl. “We don’t act differently when we go to church. The church service is like a party where we raise a joyful noise to the Lord. . . . You have never known a Catholic bishop like me. I’m telling you right now: I’m partying right now. . . . God is on my side.”
By now, his sermon has visibly stirred the standing-room-only assembly at his Imani Temple, a former Baptist church on Capitol Hill. Suddenly he stops preaching and takes off in a run down the main aisle to the back of the church. Many in the congregation have begun clapping as he shouts, “I’m no ordinary Catholic.”
Indeed.
Stallings, 46, is the self-styled “renegade priest” of the Roman Catholic Church in America. He was suspended in 1989 after starting an experimental parish by and for blacks. According to Vincent Clark, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Washington, Stallings “essentially excommunicated himself” when he announced in early 1990 that his African American Catholic Congregation would be an autonomous entity serving the nation’s estimated 2 million black Catholics, separate from Rome and its church authority.
The archdiocese declines to comment further on the breakaway church of Stallings’, who is a former director of evangelism for the archdiocese. Says Clark: “We went through a long period dealing with Father Stallings, and everything we had to say is on the record.”
Stallings had staked his career on a separate African-American rite within the church, one that would be comparable to the church’s Ukrainian and Armenian rites, but felt compelled to split when his archbishop ordered a halt to his activities.
So far, so good.
Last year Stallings acquired the former Baptist church as the permanent site for his Imani Temple, which serves as the mother church and cathedral of his movement. The new denomination now claims 4,200 members, with congregations in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Lafayette, La., Richmond, Va., and Lagos, Nigeria.
Among the new members is Ivy Elliot, a Washington teacher, who was raised a Catholic but found the traditional church services “downbeat.”
“I didn’t feel any different after going to mass than I would have by staying home,” Elliot said. By contrast, at Imani Temple she finds mass “spiritually uplifting, more of a celebration than a service.”
“Once I went, I couldn’t stop going,” she said. “It’s addictive, and it gives people of color something special without excluding anyone else.”
As in many predominantly black Catholic parishes, services at Imani (Swahili for “faith”) meld the African-American experience-its deeply felt and expressive spirituality-with the spectacle of traditional Catholic liturgy. Sunday mass may last three hours, but there is no lag or time for wool-gathering when Stallings is the celebrant and preacher.
Stallings, who keeps in shape by lifting weights and jogging, caused a stir at the recent Sunday mass when he sprinted up the stairs of the balcony and perched on the edge overlooking the congregation. “Have you had a party?” he asked. The answer was an overwhelming “Yes,” with not an audible dissent.
In June the charismatic archbishop plans to move to Lafayette, located in a historic center of the nation’s black Catholic population and a fertile field for converts. Already he’s talking about plans for AACC churches in the nearby towns of Opelousas, St. Martinville and Breaux Bridge.
The church is also exploring possible congregations in Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Oakland and St. Louis. “If we had the necessary clergy, we would open temples in all these cities within the next six months,” Stallings said in an interview at his spartan cathedral office located in a row house attached to the graystone Victorian church.
No stranger to controversy
Stallings, now at work on his memoirs to be titled “Confessions of a Renegade Priest,” jokingly divides recent ecclesiastical history into two periods, “B.S. and A.S.-Before Stallings and After Stallings.”
Stallings, who was raised a Catholic in New Bern, N.C., talked about his run-ins with church authority since his seminary days.
There was the Raleigh bishop who ordered him to shave off his mustache, despite his protests that “it was a cultural thing . . . every black man you see has one.” At the time, he was a student on vacation from the North American College in Rome, the West Point for aspirants to the Catholic priesthood, and reluctantly complied.
Back in Italy, he had a run-in with the college’s rector-James Hickey, later the archbishop-cardinal in Washington and his superior-because he had a pet dog.
At age 28, two years after his ordination in 1974, Stallings was named pastor of St. Teresa of Avila Church in Washington, a parish with a reputation for its African-American liturgy and gospel choir. He was the youngest priest ever appointed a pastor-a position he would hold 12 years-in the Washington archdiocese.
Stallings speaks proudly of “beating (the Roman Catholic Church) to the punch” not only on race and gender but also on other divisive issues. The African American Catholic Congregation is officially pro-choice on abortion and contraception, nonjudgmental about homosexuality and open to married priests.
In July 1989, the same month of Imani Temple’s inaugural service, the nation’s Catholic bishops pledged to give “full voice” to blacks in the church. Their statement, conceding “elements of racism in the church” past and present, said “we need to recognize more black leadership; our liturgies need more of the vibrancy, and our policies more of the insight, of African-Americans.”
Since 1984 the Catholic Church has encouraged the adaptation of the traditional Roman liturgy to the “African-American spiritual heritage.” But a recent survey of black Catholic opinion has found “very little support” for a separate African-American rite such as Stallings’, according to Hilbert Stanley, executive director of the Baltimore-based National Black Catholic Congress. The survey remains subject to comment by the congress’ trustees before it is submitted to the nation’s Catholic bishops.
`Insults and abuse’
From Stallings’ point of view, the church’s slow pace in resolving the issue of an African-American rite reflects its disinterest in the plight of blacks.
He is not particularly impressed, for instance, by the prominent play given to blacks, who make up about 20 percent of the Washington archdiocese’s Catholic population, in its weekly newspaper.
“Church leaders don’t want to deal with the fact that they have made false promises to blacks,” he asserted. “The church has been saying to us for over a hundred years, `If you wait long enough, we’ll produce.’ “
Stallings spoke of the “insults and ecclesiastical abuse” that blacks experienced for generations because of the segregationist practices the church permitted: Catholic hospitals that refused to treat blacks, segregated schools, and segregated seating in churches, where blacks received communion and confessed their sins separately from whites.
“The church is supposed to be where we can challenge society and the mores of society to be different in such a way to show the power of God in it,” he said. “But the church was a bedfellow with a lot of the prejudicial stances and discriminatory practices of the time.”
Even more telling, Stallings argued, is the fact that “in almost three decades the Roman Catholic Church has not opened a new parish or new school in the African-American community.”
Yet, he said, “we are constantly being confronted with the so-called reliable statistics that in the 1960s or early 1970s there were 800,000 African-Americans who were Roman Catholic, and in the late 1980s the number had more than doubled to 2 million.” (The Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. claims 60 million members, from infants to adults.)
“What amuses me is that the numbers have so drastically increased, almost 150 percent,” he said. “How is it you don’t need to create more housing for the larger family? If the family is expanding and yet you are not expanding houses but shutting down houses, then something is wrong.”
A growing flock
As the ranking official of the African American Catholic Congregation, Stallings-who was consecrated a bishop in a 1990 California ceremony by bishops representing independent Orthodox and Catholic groups-has already ordained two women, one a former nun, for his church’s ministry.
Five men have also been ordained, and two former Roman Catholic priests also serve the burgeoning flock. There are currently five candidates for the priesthood, among them Rosilyn Carroll, the affirmative-action director of the University of Wisconsin-Stout at Menomonie. Carroll, now a deacon, is also an associate pastor of Imani Temple.
During a tour of the temple, Stallings said his church must “begin to challenge people to understand that what they must be about is not religion, but a form of spirituality that ministers to their profound spiritual as well as corporal needs and makes them whole, affirms them, sanctifies them and at the same time redeems them.
“A lot of people have been so caught up in the religion that they have forgotten about the Redeemer. You see the quintessential expression of that in the Roman Catholic Church, where people are so caught up in the rituals and doctrine that they have forgotten that all of that is to be a help, ancillary to what they should be all about.”
Considering how much Stallings has criticized the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, one might expect its bishops to treat him coolly. Yet Stallings says he was warmly received when he happened on some of his former colleagues last fall at a Washington convention hotel during a break in their annual meeting.
Stallings predicted that his church “ultimately will be the Catholic expression of choice for people of color.”
Would he ever consider reuniting with Rome if there were a black pope? The possibility doesn’t seem to intrigue him in the slightest.
“Even if the pope had black skin,” Stallings said emphatically, “he would be more European and more Roman than John Paul II.”
