It’s not just a phenomenon in the U.S. It’s even happening in one corner of deeply Catholic Italy.
From The New York Times (gift article):
The priest stepped into the bedroom where his 90-year-old parishioner lay sleeping in a hospital bed, flanked by oxygen tanks. The pastor towered over the bed and leaned down to move close to the patient, Carlo Martini, as the old man’s eyes fluttered open briefly.
“How are you?” the priest, the Rev. Vincent Souly, asked, a bit too loudly.
Mr. Martini’s wife, Renza Giagnoni, stood to the side and watched. “It looks like we’re the United Nations!” she said, also a bit too loudly.
Father Souly is one of the few Black faces in the province of Prato, a mountainous region of Tuscany, in central Italy, where he has served for 15 years as a Roman Catholic priest. He has built warm relationships with his predominantly Italian flocks and is embraced by many parishioners. Born in Burkina Faso, and raised and ordained in the Ivory Coast, he is now an Italian citizen and is committed to staying in Prato as long as he is needed. Yet, he said, his Italian passport does not necessarily make others see him as Italian.
“Where I’m from, we say, ‘A piece of wood, no matter how long it stays in water, will never become a crocodile,’” he said. “You’re accepted, up to a point. But there’s this unspoken part, right? You remain what you are.”
He felt a flash of that otherness when Ms. Giagnoni referred to the United Nations, he told us later, or when parishioners referred to him as a “prete di colore” or “priest of color.”
He would prefer that people refer to him by his country of origin rather than by the color of his skin, he said. “When you say, ‘He is an African priest,’ it’s already more elegant, it’s more cultured,” he said. “That means that you’ve tried to locate where Africa is on the world map. If you say, ‘He is from the Ivory Coast,’ that’s even better. Using the color is a shortcut.”
As fewer Italians take the vows of priesthood, Father Souly is among about 1,130 African priests who oversee Italian churches — approximately 4 percent of Italy’s clergy, not including more junior church positions.
And there’s this:
Father Souly is helping to shore up an institution at the heart of Italian history and national identity — the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike foreigners working on the sidelines of Italian society, Father Souly stands front and center in his community. He is there out of spiritual mission rather than economic desperation. And his work helps sustain his parishioners’ religious lives, even if some of them feel ambivalent about the implications of his presence.
