Rowe's leaving is a way to 'stop
colluding'
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff Washington
Two recent events in the life of former Marist Br. Cyprian Rowe
seemed to serve as both prod and invitation to move beyond his Roman Catholic
boundaries.
But his decision to leave the Catholic church and to be ordained
as priest and bishop in the African American Catholic Congregation, established
in 1989 by the former Roman Catholic priest (now Archbishop) George Stallings,
has roots that go far deeper than recent months. The decision in many ways is
the culmination of a lifetime of struggle within an institution that, he
believes, never took black issues seriously.
One of the two recent events to affect Rowe was his mother's death
in May 1996. Of her death, the African-American scholar -- one of the first to
receive a doctorate in African-American studies from Howard University -- said,
"I was confronted with a real freedom that I had not experienced. No one was
depending on me any more.
"I had lived outside the Marist community for all these years
because there were always concerns -- my parents," said Rowe, whose father died
earlier. Rowe was teaching at institutions where African-Americans were
involved as students or faculty. He also was helping his parents physically and
financially as they aged.
Following his mother's death, he said, "I had to make some really
critical decisions -- whether or not I could go back and live in what basically
is a white community, for I was the only black brother. I realized I couldn't
do that."
The second event that confirmed Rowe in his move occurred in the
wider U.S. Catholic church. "I want to make it very clear," he said during an
NCR interview, "that one of the things that helped me make the decision
was when that Common Ground group, when the list was published, and there was
no African-American. There was no African-American! What does that mean?
"If indeed Cardinal Bernardin was the best of the best," Rowe
said, "and this is his project, and it is not important enough for us to be
there, I decided it was best to stop colluding. It was getting to be a sin not
following what the Lord was calling me to."
Rowe's was not a decision made in youth or haste -- and it was as
personal as the decision he made as a five-year-old when he told his mother, a
Methodist, that he had decided to become a Catholic. His influence was the nuns
and children in the church and the school across the road from the home of the
person who watched him after school. He was baptized two years later.
Rowe was born 61 years ago in Dalton, Ga. Raised in Chicago and
New York City, he joined the Marist Brothers after he had completed his
sophomore year at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx.
After college graduation he taught in New York, received his
master's degree in English and comparative literature from Hunter College and
then taught at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., until 1968, when he began
his Howard University studies. From 1970-72 he lived in Ghana doing
research.
He started the black studies program at the University of Rhode
Island in 1972, joined Temple University's Pan-African studies program in 1974
and stayed four years.
Though he would give talks and workshops, Rowe was marginal to
black Catholic issues in those days, he said. That changed when in 1978 he
joined the National Office for Black Catholics, an organization loosely
affiliated with but outside the U.S. Catholic Conference, though dependent on
diocesan collections for survival.
By 1981 he was executive director of the National Black Catholic
Clergy Caucus.
"I don't think the issues have changed over the years," he said,
"but there is the notion that people grow up. There is a need for people to
direct their own lives, that people must not always be a subset of something
much larger and more important than they." Black Catholics, he said, are
patronized by the church, "always, always."
Rowe met the charismatic Fr. George Stallings in Washington in the
1970s when Br. Mario Hancock, a black Atonement Friar, was at Howard University
Newman Center and had them to dinner. Hancock and Stallings had studied in Rome
together.
Stallings was an associate pastor in southeast Washington and was
teaching in the Western Maryland seminary. When he put on a black Catholic day
to acquaint seminarians with the black Catholic community, Rowe was a
speaker.
After receiving a master's in social work from the Catholic
University of America, Rowe worked at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, and Loyola
University of Chicago before joining the University of Maryland faculty in
1988.
Maryland's Shady Grove campus was close enough to Washington that
Rowe would stay some weekends with Stallings, who at that time was wrestling
with decisions about his own future. "He would talk about what he really wanted
to do," said Rowe, "ministering to black people in a way that was far more
embrasive of African-American culture.
"Stallings really had deep feelings for Cardinal Hickey, didn't
want to hurt him, but couldn't figure out how to tell him. I said, 'He also
cares a lot for you, so go talk to him about the particular agony you're
experiencing.' " Stallings was about to do that, said Rowe, when NCR
wrote an article about Stallings' plan to possibly establish his own church.
"That beat him to the punch before he was able to speak to the cardinal," said
Rowe.
Negotiations between Stallings and the cardinal eventually brought
no resolution, and Stallings founded Imani Temple. Rowe said Stallings felt
that at St. Therese parish in Washington, he had over time developed a way of
ministering to black Catholics that was not only congenial in terms of their
culture but an evangelistic enterprise happening on a number of levels,
creating individual and community growth. He wanted to carry that further. As
Rowe tells it, the black Catholic frustration then as now was that the
institutional Catholic church "never seems to listen," a deafness that dates
back to the black Catholics' late 19th century African-American Congress
movement and its successors.
Said Rowe, "America wasn't America in 1789. It becomes aware of
itself as it grows in terms of what it has said it wants to be. It changes.
[Similarly] there has been tremendous growth on the part of [black Catholics]
in understanding themselves and their Catholicism.
"But this must not be understood as somehow primarily a protest
against Roman Catholicism," he said, but, rather, black Catholics' "desire to
grow in a way that does not ask them to be something they are not," he
said.
Meaning what? NCR asked. Rowe replied that black Catholics
in Stalling's congregation are "challenged to discover in themselves and our
culture all those things that for years they were asked not to look at," Rowe
replied, "the prayer style, liturgical style, the various spiritualities that
might be available -- we never fully determined those." As in his own life as a
black Catholic brother, he explained, "my Roman Catholic directors, by
definition, are always going to be people not of my race or culture. They are
always going to have the right to say no. I cannot ever assume that they are
going to honor me or my cultural norms on anything they decide."
His own decision to leave was made over four to five months of
discernment, consultation and discussions with his spiritual director, he said.
He had always declined to be ordained in the Roman Catholic church but decided
he would become a priest and bishop in his new congregation, though he will not
have duties as a pastor.
Imani Temple's major gain is that Rowe the academic will
concentrate on consolidation. "Archbishop Stallings is tremendously
charismatic," said Rowe, "but it takes people behind the scenes to organize
things" in terms of rules of church governance, relationships within the
clergy, how the various temples relate to one another, "all those things taken
for granted in a Roman Catholic diocese have to be written down."
At the pew level, he will work on incorporating into the liturgies
"what we know of African history and culture and African-American history and
culture, black liberation theology, and, well, Father Clarence Rivers has been
doing liturgy forever. How do we take all of that and live it out?"
In the African American Catholic Congregation with its Imani
Temples in seven U.S. cities, said Rowe, "we don't have to go outside anymore
and ask, 'May we?'"
Former Marist Br. Cyprian Rowe has been a member of
NCR's board since 1988. He has one year left on his current term.
Asked about Rowe's board status, Tom Fox, NCR
editor and publisher and president of the board, replied, "Cyprian is a
committed Christian who has added much to the boardover the years with his
unique and needed perspective. He'salso a friend and colleague. All the board
members know our company's mission is to work withing the Catholic church, so I
expect a lively and interesting discussion at the [June] board meeting."
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National Catholic Reporter, April 25,
1997
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