Making History at the Altar of God
The death of Pope Francis stirs memories of growing up Black and Catholic in the Deep South during segregation—and reminded me of an old-school bar joke.
When Pope Francis died, I remembered what it felt like to grow up Catholic in the Deep South before we African Americans were freed from separate-but-equal. I remembered wearing a white suit for First Holy Communion at Our Lady of Lourdes, the first and only parish for Atlanta’s Black Catholics at the time.
I also remembered the bishop gently slapping my face during Confirmation two years later to symbolize that defending and witnessing my faith might sometimes lead to conflict and adversity.
But mostly I remembered the day four schoolmates and I became the first Black Catholics to receive the Ad Altare Dei Award, the highest honor bestowed on a Catholic Boy Scout, at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Atlanta, Georgia.
That day was significant to me because we were making history. But also because of what it felt like to walk down the cathedral’s long white nave for the first time.
The year was 1962, and Black folks who found themselves in a white Catholic Church for one reason or another were required to sit in the back. Not because Atlanta’s bishop wanted it that way — he did not — but because we lived under segregation. Which was law in the sovereign state of Georgia.
Lord, I am not worthy
That day was for me the culmination of everything it meant to be a true believer. In my crisp, freshly laundered uniform with the merit-badge sash across my chest, I felt as if I were being knighted. After eight months of study and testing required for the award, my schoolmates and I were finally worthy.
Worthy to march down the nave of an all-white church. Worthy to have a ribboned medal with a dangling gold cross pinned to our uniforms. Worthy of the words we’d been hearing and responding to ever since we first learned to pronounce Latin properly in order to serve as altar boys during the sacrament of the Mass.
Priest: Et introibo ad altare Dei (And I shall go to the altar of God)
Altar Boy: Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. (To God, who gives joy to my youth)
To be a Black Catholic during those cusp years of Civil Rights was a mixed bag. On one hand, we were burdened with a concept of worthiness that reflected the prejudices of segregation. You can’t grow up hearing the words Domine, non sum dignus (Lord, I am not worthy) during every single Mass without internalizing some of that.
After all, we African Americans had to prove we were worthy every day. We had to represent the race in everything we did. Many of us were brought up by parents like mine, who constantly reminded us during that long struggle for equality that we had to be better than in order to be considered equal to.
Like a sore thumb
When our scout troop was selected to march down Peachtree Street during the July 4th parade, our Scoutmaster Milton Jones (in the photo above) took it personally. A former sergeant during World War II, he was a devoted Catholic and a proud homeowner who worked at Lockheed.
“We’ll be the only Black Catholic troop in the whole parade,” he said. “And we’re gonna stick out like a sore thumb. But we’re gonna look damn good doing it.”
Which is why we met after school every day until we could snap to attention, click our heels, turn on a dime, and march like we’d been trained by Lou Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman.
Experiences like this were born of and fed by the ingrained prejudices of the time. They were part of the discipline that helped make us who we’d become. Some of us, though, would have pursued excellence regardless of racial pressures because our families instilled that desire at home.
Take Michael Yancey at the top left in the above photo, for instance. He’s a neurosurgeon today. That’s James George to his left, an engineer who became a corporate Vice President and head of 100 Black Men in Atlanta. There’s now a street downtown named after him. That’s me to his left. I did pretty well in radio and TV for a while then went back to grad school to study creative writing.
Just in front of me is Michael’s younger brother Gerald Yancey, who is now both a doctor and a lawyer. To his right is James Williams, but unfortunately I lost track of him and later learned that he died fairly young. The priest in the far left is Associate Pastor Father Christian Kuchenbrod, who mentored us through the award’s eight-month training and exam process.
Although our achievements were driven by our parents, it’s impossible to remove them from a milieu in which everything was about proving we were good enough. Good enough to receive the full benefits of citizenship guaranteed to white Americans under the Constitution. Because white Americans, long accustomed to hearing and believing that we were less than, had to be convinced. Without a shift in their attitudes, Congress would not have passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill or the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In the meantime, it was up to us
to show them our best selves. Conform to the white gaze, straighten our hair if it was kinky, speak standard English, show that we were just as worthy as they were—even if being slightly better sometimes also meant not letting on that we knew that. When you look at photographs of marchers during the Civil Rights Movement, this is why everyone is dressed in their Sunday best.
The thing about being Catholic, though, was the belief that membership in the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church—the one true religion” provided a respite, if not an outright exemption, from segregation. We Catholics were all part of the Body of Christ. All brothers and sisters in the eyes of God. All members of the same club.
Or so I believed until I learned from the archbishop himself that Atlanta’s white Catholics would take their children out of church-run schools altogether if they were required to attend school with Black Catholics in a upscale Black neighborhood on the other side of town.
For this reason, he closed the high school from which I’d graduated valedictorian, sending its remaining students to white high schools where they learned just how unlike Christ white Catholics could be.
If receiving the Ad Altare Dei Award was one defining moment, hearing that from the archbishop a few years later was another. My relationship with the Catholic Church hasn’t been the same since.
Which is why I watched the tenure of Jorge Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis in 2013, with a sense of optimism and hope as he sought to take the church in a new direction, despite opposition from conservative critics.
When he died after one last Easter Sunday celebration on April 21, 2025, the following joke came to mind:
Pope Francis, Rumi, and a Politician Walk into a Bar
Addressing Pope Francis first, the bartender says: “What would you like?”
“I would like to care for the poor, the homeless, and all the marginalized people of the earth just as Jesus did,” says the pope.
“And what would you like?” asks the bartender, turning to Rumi.
“I would like to experience the eternally present divine essence at the center of all things and to find it everyday life and inspire the rest of humanity to do the same,” says the 13th-century Sufi mystic.
Finally the bartender turns to the third member of the trio with the same question.
“To be honest,” says the politician. “I’m just here for the photo-op.”
This joke resonates with me
because I’d been reading a collection of Rumi’s parables when I learned that J.D. Vance had visited the pope the day before the pontiff’s demise. A number of those parables like “The Parrot and the Grocer” have a similar message — namely, that things are not always what they seem.
Since then, social media users have joked that maybe the Vice President killed the pope, which was both insensitive and unfunny — but also true in a figurative way they seemed oblivious to.
That’s because Francis publically rebuked Mr. Vance in his final letter to US Bishops in February of this year—a letter that also called America’s current deportation policies a major crisis that runs counter to Christ’s message of universal love.
Without mentioning the vice president by name, the pope corrected his interpretation of ordo amoris (rightly ordered love), a phrase that appears in St. Augustine’s City of God and the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas — two cornerstones of Catholic theology.
In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Vance, a former athiest who converted to Catholicism in 2019, incorrectly stated (without using the actual term) 1that ordo amoris means that love begins with the husband and wife and the family, then extends outward in concentric circles after it is properly nurtured at home. This is a comforting view for proponents of America First, who have hijacked true Christianity to serve the goals of populist Christian nationalism.
The pope corrected the vice president’s view as kindly as possible in his February letter by pointing out that the true meaning of ordo amoris was to be found in the parable of The Good Samaritan, which has nothing to do with concentric circles.
So although J.D. Vance didn’t stick a knife in Pope Francis or shoot him with an AK47, he is in a way killing the pope by killing the pope’s message. With the help of media of coverage surrounding the pope’s death—much of which doesn’t mention his letter to American bishops at all—this seemingly esoteric theological argument has been lost. It’s the vice president’s incorrect interpretation of Christianity that will likely be repeated and promoted by those who find it useful.
What was his purpose?
Given this background, you have to wonder what the Vice President hoped to gain from a papal visit. Was it to apologize for misinterpreting a central aspect of Catholic thought? Did he hope to gain forgiveness or receive further counseling?
Was he there to ask the pope how to make amends for promoting the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the dogs and cats? Did he expect to be deeply and visibly moved, like House Speaker John Boehner when Pope Francis addressed a joint session of Congress in 2015, even resigning his post earlier than planned after meeting with the pontiff?
Without knowing any of this, there’s no way to tell if things were what they seemed to be when the 40-year-old vice president shook hands with the 88-year-old pope and sat across from him with a smile.
Fortunately for me, not every visit with a pontiff ends with such uncertainty. My 16 years of Catholic education had its origin in a life-changing papal visit that took place in January of 1887.
That’s when 29-year-old Katharine Drexel — sole heir to a massive Philadelphia banking fortune — visited Pope Leo XIII. She wanted him to send missionaries to the United States to educate and provide religious instruction to African Americans and Indians.
“Something needs to be done to help these people,” she said.
“Then why don’t you do something,” said the pope, “and become a missionary yourself?”
When she returned to the United States, Katherine Drexel established the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to educate people like me. Their first mission in Atlanta was Our Lady of Lourdes located just around the corner from the birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Lourdes is where I was baptized and received the sacraments of Confession, Holy Communion, and Confirmation while attending grade school. Before I was born, my mother even taught seventh grade there for a while.
Years later, when there was no option for African Americans to continue a Catholic education beyond eighth grade, the Drexel Foundation helped fund the high school where I learned the Pythagorean theorem and read Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin, doing well enough in standardized national achievement tests that my path through college would not become a burden for my parents.
My brothers, my son, and my nephew all attended Xavier University in New Orleans — another important Katherine Drexel institution — which has produced more Black doctors and pharmacists than any other college in the nation. We are all beneficiaries of that fateful, historic meeting between an heiress and a pope in 1887. No wonder Katharine Drexel was eventually canonized.
All of which is to say I hope something consequential happened for the vice president during his brief visit with Pope Francis during the latter’s last day on the planet. And that maybe the pope’s lifelong work on behalf of refugees, the poor, the homeless, and the marginalized influenced him in some way.
So that one day Mr. Vance — who grew up poor on the fringes of society and became a wealthy man one heartbeat from the presidency — might look back on that meeting with gratitude and affection.
Perhaps he will remember those precious few moments with the pontiff the way I look back on the Ad Altare Dei Award. As a time of deep meaning and renewed spiritual commitment. A moment in time, a moment in history. Which despite photographic evidence to the contrary, will stand for much, much more than a photo op.
©2025 Andrew Jazprose Hill / All rights reserved.
Thanks for reading/listening. Please hit the like, share, and/or comment buttons to help others find my work.
Vance did, however, use the term ordo amoris a short time later in this X-post in response to a British member of Parliament who criticized his Hannity interview.
If I had a wish it would be for your work to have a wider reach.
In reading I am reminded of my Catholic upbringing as an Italian American and how substantial the differences were. Our family was integrated with the church as we lived next door to the church and the newly built school. I played catch with the nuns and was in fear of the priests-but I never felt or faced the challenges of a Black catholic in the deep south.