Diocese reaches out to black Catholics

The Diocese of Rockville Centre has launched a new effort to bring black Roman Catholics back into the church and to attract new members, church officials said.

Always a small share of total congregants, blacks have migrated in growing numbers from the church to other faiths, church officials said.

In hopes of reversing that trend, the diocese says it is bringing in a dynamic preacher from Dominica in the West Indies to celebrate Mass at 2 p.m. Saturday at St. Agnes Cathedral in honor of Black History Month.

"I'm trying to reach out" to all black Catholics, including African-Americans and immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, said Darcel Whitten-Wilamowski, who heads the diocese's Ministry to Catholics of African Ancestry and is a Mass organizer. "Please come home. I'm begging. We need you. Don't leave. Give us a chance. Give us some ideas."

The diocese does not have precise figures, but Whitten-Wilamowski said thousands of Catholics on the Island are black. Nationally, blacks make up about 4 percent of all adult Catholics in the United States, according to a 2007 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey.

On Long Island -- which has 1.7 million Catholics -- growing numbers are coming from Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Haiti and the African nations of Nigeria and Ghana, Whitten-Wilamowski said.

But many immigrants and long-practicing African-American Catholics are joining Protestant churches or other denominations that have reached out to them, she said.

"We are losing people, we are not doing enough of this type of thing" such as the special Mass to attract them, she said.

The Saturday Mass will have as its homilist Msgr. William John-Lewis of the Diocese of Roseau in Dominica. Whitten-Wilamowski said he electrified the crowd at a Long Island religious gathering last fall, and "is back by popular demand."

He was invited, in part, in an attempt to reach out to Caribbean immigrants, she said, and called bringing him in a "turning point."

Alice Cone, who heads the Ministry to Catholics of African Ancestry at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Catholic Church in Wyandanch, said the historical experiences of African-American and black Catholics from the Caribbean is often starkly different.

She recalled attending her local Catholic church in Maryland in the late 1940s and early 1950s when it was still segregated.

"You had to sit in the back or the side, and you couldn't receive Communion until everyone else did," she said.

Black Catholics from the Caribbean, she said, didn't have that experience.While reaching out to black Catholics of all backgrounds, The diocese is focusing its effort on young people, Whitten-Wilamowski said. "Otherwise, we have no future."