Two of the nation’s African-American Catholic bishops say Black Catholic History Month, which runs throughout the month of November, is a time to remember a deemphasized legacy and celebrate the community’s holy figures.
Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville, who serves as chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus Joseph N. Perry of Chicago, the last chair of the Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, spoke with Black Catholic Messenger during the USCCB’s fall plenary assembly in Baltimore earlier this month.
“Always remember that Black Catholics have been a part of the Church for a long, long time and have brought to the Church their spirituality and their gifts, which have formed me as a Black Catholic, as a priest, and as a bishop,” said Fabre, who has served in Kentucky since 2022.
“This is a month to thank God for those gifts and also for Black Catholics to continue to share those gifts, which we all know so very very well, with the larger Church.”
Fabre, born in the 1960s in rural New Roads, Louisiana, shared that his ministry as a Black bishop flows from his experience as a young person, when he was formed in the faith as well as African-American culture by his family and faith community. He was a childhood member of historic St. Augustine Church, founded in 1922 and run by the Josephites.
“I love that parish, which formed me in the faith. My parents were very, very faithful people. Learning all of the values of Black family life, the challenges of Black family life, and all of the graces, I bring all of that gift to my ministry as a bishop,” said Fabre, who was first appointed as a bishop in 2007 at just 44 years old. He remains the nation’s youngest active Black Catholic prelate.
Bishop Perry, who retired from episcopal ministry in 2023, said Black Catholic History Month is an opportunity to make special remembrance of the seven African Americans on the path to sainthood: Venerables Pierre Toussaint, Henriette DeLille, Mary Lange, and Augustus Tolton, and Servants of God Julia Greeley, Thea Bowman, and Martin Maria de Porres Ward.
“We're pleased to see how around the country, that has really taken off,” said Perry, who himself led the diocesan phase for the canonization cause of Fr Tolton and serves as co-postulator.
“Most places you go, people have some sort of a showcasing of those individuals, whereas before, people hardly knew who these people were.”
Perry has continued to travel the country promoting the Tolton cause, including with recent pilgrimages to the places where he was born into slavery in Missouri and later ministered in Chicago as the nation’s first openly Black Catholic priest. His story and those of the other candidates have long been a centerpiece for Black Catholic history celebrations.
Perry’s own ministry has included extensive education of the public on the nature of sainthood causes, which includes several stages (Servant of God, Venerable, Blessed, and Saint), various approvals from the Vatican, and extensive research phases that typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in total.
As of 2025, Tolton’s cause is one of the furthest along, now only awaiting a miraculous intervention believed to be brought about by his intercession from heaven. Should such an occurrence—usually an otherwise unexplained medical healing—be confirmed by the Vatican, the pope could then declare him “Blessed,” allowing him to be the namesake of churches, religious communities, and confirmands.
“We’re looking out for his miracle that we hope that God will grant us to get [Tolton] beatified,” said Perry, who noted that no miracles are currently under investigation.
“Everything else is finished and completed. The research is done… We’re just waiting for God to step in and say he approves of this.”
Perry explained that much of what is reported to the Tolton cause organizers are more technically termed “favors,” a term referring to answered prayers that do not rise to the status of a miracle in the context of a sainthood cause.
Currently, no African American has ever been confirmed to have worked a miracle, with the result that there are no African-American blesseds or saints. Some have seen this as an outworking of racism, though—as Perry notes—there is perhaps more openness than ever to the celebration Black Catholic holy figures from the United States.
Nate Tinner-Williams
In his interview with BCM this month, Perry said the alleged 2022 investigation of a possible Tolton miracle was merely a "rumor".
Perry was most recently chair of the USCCB's Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, which he led from 2023 to 2025. Much of his work centered on promoting the U.S. bishops' most recent pastoral letter against racism, “Open Wide Our Hearts,” which was released in 2018.
“[It's] probably the widest disseminated letter on the topic of racism in all of the 10 that have been issued by the bishops going back to about 1958,” Perry said.
"Really from the inception of the Ad Hoc Committee, we have accomplished a wide outreach of different sectors of people in and outside the Church, by way of Catholic social teaching and the bishops' voice on different issues that arise. That has never been done before.”
The Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, founded as a temporary body in 2017, was led by Fabre from 2018 to 2023 and was officially made permanent this month under a new name. Bishop Daniel E. Garcia of Austin was named on Thursday as the first chair of the Subcommittee for the Promotion of Racial Justice and Reconciliation.
Fabre, as chair of its parent committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, says the larger work involves focusing on a number of policy issues affecting the marginalized.
“Food insecurity, housing, [capital punishment], all of the things that have as their basic principles the human dignity of each and every person,” said Fabre.
“The committee is going to continue to advocate on all of those fronts for the life and human dignity of each and every person, which in so many ways right now is under attack… All of those domestic justice and policy issues that really try to separate us from one another by denying or blinding us to the human dignity that we should be seeing in each other and responding to.”
Asked how he sees the future of the Black Catholic community as a bastion of faith and justice, Fabre said his experiences have shown him that the spiritual resilience of African Americans is key.
“I am just amazed,” he said. “Black Catholics, how strong their faith is after everything they’ve experienced, from the Church and in the Church, they still say, ‘I am here, and I'm not going anywhere.’”
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
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