St. Augustine’s Seminary opens in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
After several years working in Black communities in rural Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, it became clear to the Society of the Divine Word that their model of pastoral care in those communities was not sustainable, and that for the Black Catholicism to flourish in the United States it would need Black priests. The Vatican agreed, but a push from Rome for the education and ordination of Black American men met with the ever-present racial tensions in the United States. In October 1919 SVD Superior General Rev. Nicolaus Blum SVD gave tentative permission to the American province to open a seminary so long as a bishop would give his consent.
Rev. Matthaeus Christmann, a German SVD who was sent to the Southern missions upon his ordination in 1912, spearheaded the foundation of a seminary for Black priests and Brothers. In Greenville, MS he had negotiated with John Gunn, Bishop of the Natchez Diocese, to establish a classical high school for Black students in 1914 called Sacred Heart Academy. Fr. Christmann saw the school as a possible location for a seminary.
In 1919, Gunn agreed to the presence of a seminary for Black men in the Natchez Diocese with the conditions that any Black priests would belong to a religious community and that their education and spiritual direction had to be the sole responsibility of the community. The Society of the Divine Word approved, and by the fall of 1920 Sacred Heart College in Greenville, MS had opened for students.
Almost immediately, it was clear the seminary would need more space. The cramped quarters in Greenville did not allow for the 25 students to comfortably live and learn, and it was decided that the seminary would move 300 miles south to Bay St. Louis, where the community would also take over local parish work. The new seminary, dedicated to Church Father St. Augustine of Hippo, opened its doors September 16, 1923.
The SVDs had to confront the issue of what their students would do after ordination, a task made more difficult with untimely deaths of the seminary’s rector, Fr. Christmann, and mission superior Rev. Aloysius Heick in 1929. The Society eventually decided that priests ordained at St. Augustine’s would become full SVD members. They were hopeful that neo-presbyters could serve in Black parishes and churches at home and at the American-led Ghana and Papua New Guinea missions abroad.
On May 23, 1934, at St. Augustine’s chapel, Revs. Anthony Bourges, Maurice Rousseve, Vincent Smith, and Francis Wade became the first Black Catholic priests ordained in the United States, a momentous occasion that was reported across the Catholic world.
After the ordination, it became clear that American bishops simply would not allow any of these four men work in their dioceses. Months of negotiations with the Diocese of Lafayette, LA led to an imperfect solution: the new ordinates work as assistants under a white SVD priest at the new Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Lafayette. Only after five years, and with the ordinations of two additional Black priests, were those first four finally allowed permanent parish assignments elsewhere.
Over the decades, St. Augustine’s produced many Black priests and Brothers who spread the Society's charism. One such man, Rev. Harold Perry SVD, was educated at St. Augustine’s and ordained there in 1944 before going on to be the seminary’s first Black rector in 1957 and after that, Superior of the US Southern Province. In 1965 he became the first American-born Black bishop after his appointment as Auxiliary Bishop of New Orleans Archdiocese.
St. Augustine’s Seminary officially integrated its student body in 1950. Four white seminarians, Francis Theriault, John Sheerin, Edward Bauer, and Bernard Keller volunteered to be transferred from St. Mary’s Seminary in 1950. In 1968, Bay St. Louis became the site of the clerical novitiate and then the common novitiate in 1970.
As vocations decreased in the 1960s and 70s, activity at the seminary slowed significantly. In 1970, the decision was made to move the North American SVD novitiate to Bay St. Louis, and while St. Augustine’s Seminary finally closed in 1982, the novitiate remained there until 1990. St. Augustine's still remains vital to the SVDs’ work in the South, and currently serves as the administrative center of the US Southern Province.
If you are interested in learning more about St. Augustine's Mission House, please click to read
"Persistence and Education: The beginnings of St. Augustine’s in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi" by Rev. James Pawlicki SVD.