Cyprian Davis
Born: September 9, 1930
Died: May 18, 2015
The traditional attitude is that the Catholic Church is a white man’s church—not necessarily always hostile, but nevertheless a white church.
There has been much ignorance. There’s the perception that if you’ve got Black people who are Catholic, somebody has been messing with their religion—that they should be Baptist or something. For a long time on the grassroots level, however, Black people were not necessarily hostile to Catholics, because they felt that Catholics did good things. Nuns were accepted because they were doing service work and were religious people. Priests were accepted for the same reasons.
—Cyprian Davis
More about Cyprian Davis:
In the beginning, there were Black Catholics
In 1993, Father Cyprian Davis sat down with the editors of U.S. Catholic to talk about Black Catholic history and the future of the Black Catholic Church.
