Pierre Toussaint has been dead 139 years. But the way he lived his life is now the subject of a heated debate among American Catholics that reveals much about the modern-day church's complicated and sometimes awkward relations with its black parishioners.
For Pierre Toussaint was born, and chose to stay, a slave. At a time when slaves were rebelling in his native Haiti he was accompanying his owners to New York, where they lost their fortune but not his loyalty. By day Toussaint the coiffeur would earn money powdering and pomading the heads of New York society. By night, he would don his crimson uniform and return to wait on his invalid owner, quietly supporting her household.
After his owners died, he continued to devote himself to the poor, crossing quarantine lines to tend cholera victims and using his money to build an orphanage.
John Cardinal O'Connor says he was a model of faith and should be made a saint, a gesture of the church's concern for black Catholics. But others in the church say Toussaint was an Uncle Tom and a poor role model for modern blacks.
The Cardinal has told Toussaint supporters, who include some black clergymen, that he plans to demonstrate his enthusiasm this morning in a homily at St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Toussaint is buried. As part of Black History Month, the Cardinal is expected to urge Catholics to pray in support of Toussaint's canonization.
The question is before a commission in Rome. Although there are as many as 1,500 other candidates for sainthood, church insiders consider Toussaint a particular favorite of Pope John Paul II because he would be the perfect Vatican II saint: a layman, a married man, a native of a poor, troubled country and a nonwhite.
Bishop Emerson J. Moore of the New York Archdiocese, one of 11 black
Catholic bishops and archbishops in the country, believes Toussaint is
just what black Catholics need, particularly when secular heroes like
Mike Tyson fall by the wayside. I think that as Afro-Americans,
Haitians, Caribbean-Americans, we need role models like Pierre
Toussaint, people of great sanctity who have struggled and kept the
faith,
he said.
But what is holiness to some is servility to others.
The man was a perfect creature of his times,
said the Rev.
Lawrence E. Lucas of the Resurrection Catholic Church in Harlem. 'He
was a good boy, a namby-pamby, who kept the place assigned to him.'
Black Catholics number about 2.4 million, or about 5 percent of the total Catholic population in the United States. Some of these black Catholics rebuke the church for racism and bemoan the paucity of black priests and a liturgy so formal as to constrain spiritual expression. When Bishop George A. Stallings Jr., broke away from the church three years ago to form the African-American Catholic Congregation, he touched a raw nerve in the church hierarchy, and among black Catholics themselves.
The Toussaint campaign jangles the same sensitivities. For example,
Msgr. Robert O'Connell, pastor of St. Peter's Church in Manhattan,
refers to Toussaint as a good role model for minority groups and
young people with drugs who sometimes see the decks stacked against
them and give up on life easily.
But that kind of remark makes some black Catholics wince. It calls
out the sarcastic, 'Gee, thanks for finding us a hero' response,
said Albert Raboteau, professor of religion at Princeton
University. 'Chosen Their Own Saints'
Black Catholics long ago stopped waiting for the church to recognize
their saints, said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of the St. Sabina
Catholic Church on Chicago's South Side: I think black Catholics
have chosen their own saints by now and Rome's accreditation is
unnecessary.
A proud African-American congregation of about 900 famliies,
St. Sabina made an altar to one of its saints,
draping a bust
of Martin Luther King Jr. in the red, black and green of black
liberation.
Decades ago, black Catholics looked to busts of St. Martin de Porres,
a 16th century Peruvian-Dominican mulatto, as witness to the fact
that they were authentic members of the Church,
Professor Raboteau
said. But it doesn't seem that symbols of piety, in the present day
and age, really address the more pressing social concerns of black
Catholics.
As to Toussaint -- certainly the guy was charitable, but he was
also passive and servile. His biography doesn't exactly resonate with
the mood of activism of black Catholics today.
Black Catholics would more likely look for sainthood
candidates
among 20th-century activist figures, like Martin Luther King Jr.,
Thomas Wyatt Turner, educator and N.A.A.C.P. founding member, or
Sister Thea Bowman, educator and evangelist, some said. Faded Into
History
Unfortunately, the average African-American Catholic has never even
heard of Pierre Toussaint,
said Walter Hubbard, director of the
National Office for Black Catholics.
One of the leading black New Yorkers of his day, Toussaint faded into history until the John Boyle O'Reilly Committee for Interracial Justice, an Irish-American group devoted to social justice for blacks, began researching and promoting his life story in the early 1950's.
Born in 1766 in Haiti, Toussaint died in 1853 in New York, where, in a display of faith uncommon to the era, he attended Mass daily for 66 years at St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street.
As a plantation slave near the town of St. Marc in the Artibonite Valley in Haiti, Toussaint lived a quiet life as a house servant, encouraged to read and write by his French aristocratic owners, the John Berard family. By the time he was 21, the slave revolt that would earn Haiti its independence was brewing and the Berards fled to New York, taking Toussaint with them.
For that reason, Toussaint, who has a small, proud following among religious Haitian-Americans, does not enjoy overwhelming popular support in Haiti. A 'Docile Slave?'
At the start of the slave revolt, what Toussaint did was flee that
fight for freedom,
said the Rev. Gilles Danroc, a French priest in
the Artibonite Valley. We have to ask: Is the church encouraging
the model of the docile slave who follows his master and waits
patiently for his liberation?
Shortly after they settled in New York, the Berards lost their fortune and Mr. Berard died. Toussaint, who had been apprenticed to a coiffeur, became a hit among high society women, both as confidant and as architect of the monumental hairdos of the era. Earning as much as $1,000 a year per client, Toussaint was wealthy enough to support his owner and to buy freedom for several slaves.
When Toussaint was 45, Mrs. Berard died, granting him freedom on her deathbed. Toussaint soon married a Haitian woman, and they not only opened their home to black orphans but raised the money to start an orphanage for white children.
While Toussaint was renowned for crossing barricades to nurse
quarantined cholera patients, he also quietly raised funds to help
build the original St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Vincent de Paul
Church. When St. Patrick's opened, a white usher refused to let
Toussaint take his seat in the pews. But years later, Toussaint was
buried there, after a high Mass attended by New York society. The New
York Evening Post headlined his glowing obituary, Uncle Tom Not an
Apocryphal Character.
'He Is Not P.C.'
The only problem with Toussaint is that he is not P.C.
or
politically correct, said the Rev. Thomas J. Wenski, director of the
Pierre Toussaint Haitian-Catholic Center in Miami. He was not naive
to the existence of racism inside and outside the church. That he
could still love the church, warts and all -- maybe that's why JP2 is
pushing him.
After exhuming Toussaint's skeleton in 1990, Cardinal O'Connor had his
remains moved from Mulberry Street to a crypt at the modern-day
St. Patrick's. Last June, the archdiocese sent six boxes of
documentation to Vatican City, including 15 bound volumes of letters
to and from Toussaint, and a file called Statements of Claimed
Miracles and Favors Attributed to the Servant of God Pierre
Toussaint.
In the miracles file is the story of Gesner Lamonthe, a school principal in Liancourt, Haiti, who was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1973 when he was 25 and given three months to live. He and his priest prayed to Toussaint, and the cancer was said to vanish.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints conducts an arduous, often decades-long inquiry into every sainthood candidate's life, including a medical and church investigation of every reported miracle. One miracle is needed for beatification, and a second for canonization, although the Pope can waive the latter requirement.
Rome has told us, 'We have read most of your voluminous documents,'
which is very, very encouraging because sometimes this stuff can stay
on their shelf for 20 years,
said Monsignor O'Connell, member of
the Pierre Toussaint Guild.
Toussaint enthusiasts in the New York Archdiocese are aware that
Toussaint presents a controversial choice, but prefer to see clashing
opinions more positively. We have to be free enough to appreciate
and recognize differences,
Bishop Moore said. You have in the
church a Father Lucas and a Bishop Moore, one advocating change
loudly, the other pushing for it more quietly. In the same way, you
can revere a Pierre Toussaint for his faith and still keep, as I do, a
picture of Malcolm X on your wall.
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