New Orleans, La., Feb 12, 2018 / 12:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Of the 106 historically black colleges in the United States, only one is Roman Catholic – Xavier University of Louisiana.
But Xavier is also the only Catholic college, of the United States’ 251 Catholic colleges, to have been founded by an American-born saint.
C. Reynold Verret, president of Xavier University of Louisiana, told CNA that the spirit and charism of St. Katharine Drexel, foundress of the school, continue strongly on campus today.
“She saw education as a transformative gift, and that’s something we need to understand today,” Verret said. “That education is not a gift to the individual, even though it does improve the life of the individual, but it’s a gift to the communities to which those individuals returned, in which they serve, it’s an ever-expanding gift.”
Katharine Drexel was born to a wealthy and devout Catholic family in Philadelphia in 1858, and shocked much of society when she decided to become a religious sister and a missionary to Native Americans and African-Americans.
Supported by the inheritance from her father, Drexel and her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament founded schools to serve these populations throughout the United States, including a Catholic secondary school for African-Americans in Louisiana in 1915.
By 1917, she also established a preparatory school for teachers, one of the few career tracks available to Black Americans at the time. A few years later, the school was able to offer other degrees as well and became a full-fledged university in 1925.
Drexel’s gift was her ability to see potential, and God’s presence, in all people, despite having grown up in a segregated world.
“There’s a famous New York Times interview in 1915 when…the reporter asked Mother Katharine – ‘why are you using this expensive Indiana limestone for a school for black children?’ And Mother Katherine said, ‘do they not deserve the best?’” Verret said.
“We often remind ourselves of that, and I think that comes from her spirituality, where she could see, despite living in a segregated country where some were more valued than others, somehow she could see value in all, and I think that is her charism,” he said.
That charism continues on in Xavier University today through its “rigorous academics, its great faculty, and expectations,” Verret said.
Besides being a top-ranked Historically Black College and University (HBCU), Xavier University also sends the most African Americans on to medical school of any HBCU in the country, Verret told CNA. The school is also one of the top HBCUs for sending students on to doctoral programs in the sciences, and has several alumni who are currently serving as federal judges, he added.
“We have great students, some who come to us and may not have had the pre-collegiate experience that they needed or deserved,” Verret said. “But we recognize where their gaps are and address them and they graduate.”
Verret said that the Catholic Church has a rich tradition in the black Catholic community from which to draw, and that the Church can continually grow and learn when it comes to reaching out to the black community. During Katharine Drexel’s time, many Catholic Churches and institutions operated with the same segregation as the rest of the country.
“As a human institution we fall short of God our Father and the calling of Jesus, but that’s not (surprising) because we’re human institutions in the process of perfection – we are called to speak the truth and to bring real information and light before the world and into the Church,” he said.
The Institute of Black Catholic Studies out of Xavier University also examines the worship styles and cultural traditions of black Catholics in the country.
What is distinct about black Catholic culture can be seen clearly in the music and worship style of the community, Verret said.
“I would offer any parish to use the hymnal ‘Lead Me Guide Me’, created by the Institute of Black Catholic Studies in the late 70s and 80s,” Verret said. “The style of worship somewhat differs from the style of worship in the Northern European tradition – it is not quiet, it is much more expressive of spirituality, people sing, people express things with their hands.”
While Xavier University is historically black, the school has always been open to students of other races, and today’s student population is about 70 percent black and 30 percent students of other races.
This diversity provides students with learning opportunities both in and out of the classroom, Verret said, which can show students how to be united even with those who are different than they are, Verret said.
“In this moment we’re still struggling with – ‘who’s the other?’ We’re not assuming that we are all one people. But really we have an expansive global message [at Xavier] which is that we are one people and what we have to give is for the large community and the larger nation,” he said.
During February, which is Black History Month, the school is also sponsoring events and speakers to honor their cultural heritage, including an art exhibit, a private screening of the movie Black Panther, and a screening of the HBCU series “Tell Them We Are Rising”.
Verret added that he hoped the message that Xavier University sends through its students and alumni is one that continues to dissipate the myth that black students can’t perform as well as other students.
“We are disabusing the nation of the myth that was prevalent after the Civil War, which is that these young people are not educated and could not be educated at a high level. What Xavier did was to educate students who can sit and compete and be equal and present whether at medical school or law school…and these students demonstrate that they’re able to achieve and contribute at those levels, and that’s an important message.”
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Though Islam refers to itself as “The Religion of Peace”. serenity and tranquility seem to allude it too often. The news of the day gives a different impression as to the claims!
Muslims that have converted to Christianity are outstanding representatives of the Christian faith. Praise God for their testimony.
Psalm 119:165 Great peace have those who love your law; nothing can make them stumble.
Psalm 34:14 Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.
Psalm 29:11 May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace!
Psalm 4:8 In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
James 3:18 And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.
Blessings for Rushdie and for all Muslims that they too come to the un-surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ.
About the novel, “Satanic Verses,” this further explanation of its origin: “The title refers to the Satanic Verses, a group of Quranic verses that refer to three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt. The part of the story that deals with the ‘satanic verses’ was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari” (Wikipedia).
Even the very first biographers wrote long after Muhammad, the first about one hundred twenty years after his death: Ibn Ishaq (704-773 A.D.). The only version of this lost work was edited by Ibn Hisham (d. 835 or 840), a full two centuries after Muhammad, and translated into English by A. Guillaume only in 1955 (“The Life of Muhammad”. Oxford University Press, 800 pages of small print).
The “satanic verses” in the Qur’an refer to a visit Muhammad (as the revolutionary monotheist) is said still to have made one night to a pagan temple. The triad goddesses are the offspring of Allah and his wife. Charged with hypocrisy, Muhammad immediately regretted the one-night relapse and unambiguously clarified the distance between Allah alone and the paganism of Mecca.
Related to which, Muhammad’s understanding of the Triune Oneness is distorted by the cultural imprint that the Christian Faith is only a (pagan-like) triad. And, further, the error identifies the triad as God, Jesus (under Islam, a prophet rather than “the word made flesh”), and Mary (there is no Holy Spirit).
Muslims do not read the Bible, because they know (!) that under the Qur’an, as the final revelation (“the word made book”), all chronologically earlier scriptures—both Jewish and Christian—are corruptions of Islam as the definitively-restored natural religion.
I’m starting to think of Francis not as a new Luther but as a new Mohammed, seeking, in due course to erase all that preceded him. Of course he needs references to Christ from time to time, but essentially as a prop to confer an imaginary semblance of legitimacy for his agenda.
God bless you dear physicist and seeker of God’s truth.
Or, maybe not a new Muhammad, but a sprout from the same trunk of natural religion?
In olden times the Syrian scribes—forced converts to Islam—are thought to have inserted Christian references into the Qur’an, in order to make scavenger-hunt Islam more palatable. (Hold that thought…).
The Qur’an borrow from the Pentateuch, in part to endorse the “law of Moses,” but so far as I can find, explicit reference is made only to the first four (affirmative) commandments, and not to the (prohibitive) final six (thou shalt not…). The parallel, some would say, is with current distortions of moral theology, which celebrate works of charity and mercy while discounting the absolute moral prohibitions as steadfastly affirmed (rigid?) in the Catechism and Veritatis Splendor.
So, will the new super-dicastery of Evangelization peddle a generic Christianity unaccountable to the demoted “dicastery” for Doctrine of the Faith, or not?
And, does “fraternity”—-with all of its favorable meanings–also represent an accommodation like that of the Syrian scribes of the 7th and 6th centuries? But, instead of making Islam more palatable to past-Christians (as in the past), does the current trajectory render a diluted Christianity more palatable to a resurgent Islam? Is Hollerich’s synodal “scientific foundation” (for jettisoning sexual morality) simply a natural religion (tending toward a folk religion) like Islam but cross-dressed in modern clothes? Bishop Batzing in an open collar rather than a turban?
Osmosis works in both directions! Syrian-Islam and post-Christian Catholicism, both, as natural religions? No longer convinced, or forthright, or proclaiming (different from proselytizing), or even articulate about the divinely-revealed and gifted life of supernatural grace?
7th and 8th centuries.
Seriously Edward J Baker? How do you extrapolate a judgement of Pope Francis from this article or is it that you have to negate our Pope as some badge of belonging to right thinking?…..
“Of course he needs references to Christ from time to time, but essentially as a prop to confer an imaginary semblance of legitimacy for his agenda.”
……if you alone say so!
In 1989, I, being a callow college student, was predicing that shocking and barbaric crimes like this one would surely knock some sense into the thick-skulled liberals who congregate at such places as Chautauqua. They would surely demand immigration policies to keep such people as this fanatic out of the country. Alas, since that time, there have been many such incidents, some far worse than this one, and the open-borders lunacy on the Left has only become more extreme. As the title of James Burnham’s classic put it, liberalism is the suicide of the West.
And from Tony W, it’s the thick skulled liberals who cop some flack. Indeed they need some sense knocked into them! Observations and insights inspired by what? Chautauqua is not your style? Not mine either but I hardly see it as a contributor to the social/spiritual malaise you are attributing. It’s a big world after all. Somehow for many in the USA it’s getting terribly small?
Ok so lets think for a moment that you can have it your way. All the likes of Chautauqua are done away with. The Immigration policy now prevents all crazies
( Muslims, Aliens and others who encroach upon your national boarder i suppose ) are no longer a problem…. they are gone or only the nice ones remain. Your ‘Christian Nation’ has uniformity of doctrine from east to west, north to south. All people conform to ( your ) world view by some form of decree I suppose. The Christian world view according to the likes of you, because that is what it would be. Do you really think that would address ‘the human condition’ Jesus so clearly enunciated in his teachings as contained in the Gospels? Let your imagination run wild!
Salman has lived under terrible pressure for so many years. I Pray he recovers.