Black parish work in the Rust Belt begins
St. Monica’s was a historically Black church founded in 1889 by Rev. Augustus Tolton, the first black Catholic priest in the United States. In his letter to Provincial Superior Rev. Adolph Burgmer SVD, Mundelein stipulated that the parish would be for Blacks only, and that “all other Catholics of whatsoever race or color are requested not to intrude.” The Black press and some in the Black Catholic community saw this as segregation, and publicly criticized both the archbishop, and consequently the SVDs, for the decision.
Rev. Stephen Theobald, a prominent Black Guyanese priest working in Minneapolis, wrote that the publication of Mundelein’s letter “was immediately construed as nothing short of ‘Jim-Crowing’ the Negro in a most solemn manner.”[1] As such, the SVDs felt they had something to prove to the parishioners of St. Monica’s. While its first few years overseeing the parish were quite difficult, the community was able to return St. Monica’s to firm financial ground. The SVDs also founded a school that proved enormously popular with both new and existing parishioners, the same strategy they had successfully employed in the Southern missions a decade prior.
By 1922 it had become clear St. Monica’s facilities were too old and too small for the congregation, and the parish had begun raising funds for a new church and school. The SVDs continued to win praise from their parishioners by actively pushing the archdiocese for a solution. Finally, on December 6, 1924, after two years of negotiations, Mundelein transferred responsibility for a nearby formerly white parish, St. Elizabeth’s, to the SVDs. St. Monica’s was then merged with St. Elizabeth’s over the next two years, and the former was shuttered. The latter became the Black mother church of Chicago, and the SVDs have remained in service there to the present day.
Based on their success at St. Monica’s and St. Elizabeth’s, other Black parishes were placed into SVD hands in the decades that followed, among them St. Anselm (1932) and Our Lady of the Gardens (1949) in Chicago; St. Nicholas in St. Louis, MO (1926); Our Lady of the Divine Shepherd (1941) and St. Peter Claver (1943) in New Jersey; and St. Rita in Indianapolis, IN (1973).
Out of the dozens of SVD priests and Brothers who have served the people of these parishes, the one most synonymous with the early growth of the community’s Black apostolate is Rev. Joseph Eckert. Ordained in 1909 at St. Gabriel’s Mission House in Austria, Fr. Eckert arrived at Techny that same year. He taught at St. Joseph’s Technical School and later St. Mary’s Mission House before being named pastor of St. Monica’s in 1921. He was the one who successfully spearheaded the parish’s merger with St. Elizabeth’s, and after an incredibly successful tenure as pastor there he was assigned the first SVD pastor of St. Anselm’s in 1932. In 1940 he was appointed the first superior of the SVD’s new U.S. Southern Province, where he oversaw not only a network of Black parishes, but St. Augustine’s Mission House, the first Black Catholic seminary in the United States. By the time of his death in 1965, he had devoted over 40 years to Black Catholics.
[1] Stephen Theobald to Edward Hoban, February 9, 1918. St. Monica’s Parish collection.
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- Rev. Joseph Eckert SVD poses with a group of recently baptized parishioners outside of St. Elizabeth's in Chicago
- Schoolchildren outside Our Lady of the Divine Shepherd in Trenton, NJ
- The current Church of St. Elizabeth in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood shortly after its dedication in 1989
- A baptismal ceremony at St. Anselm's in Chicago, 1938