Not much time is likely to pass when speaking with someone from Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Atlanta before a phrase is mentioned: “the Lourdes experience.”
That experience is something that, well, has to be experienced. The choir has a lot to do with it – and for most people, the music is what initially strikes first-time visitors. But the preaching also has a lot to do with “the Lourdes experience,” and so does the super-welcoming atmosphere.
Our Lady of Lourdes is known as the Mother Church of African-American Catholics in Atlanta – the first parish to serve the Black Catholic community.
It was started in 1912 with funding from St. Katharine Drexel, and its school was run for many years by her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, whose special mission was to the Black and Native Catholic communities of the US.
And Lourdes’ location in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood put it at the center of the American Civil Rights movement. The birth home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is practically in Lourdes’ backyard, and the church where King preached – Ebenezer Baptist – is a couple of blocks away. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are entombed right across the street, at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park (the King Center).
But while Lourdes' historic location has been, in the words of one parishioner, an “enhancement,” the parish is loved primarily for the spiritual gift it has been in people’s lives.
“The locale of the church is significant, but if the church was anywhere else in Atlanta and it was still the same base core group, same base values, same music program, it would still be the same for me,” said longtime parishioner Patricia Davenport.
Important for Davenport is the parish’s “sense of self, the sense of community that we have there.”
“You can feel the Spirit when you're there,” said Alex Oyler, a young father who works in consulting. “And I can say, honestly, I've been to churches all around the world, and I have not found a music experience that's better than what you find at Lourdes.”
Oyler’s wife, Bailey, is white and is not Catholic but grew up Baptist.
“She's like, ‘I don't think I ever would have wanted to go to a Catholic church before,’ but I think the way Lourdes approaches worship is something that has appealed to her,” Oyler told Aleteia. “And she's much more excited to go to Mass with me than she ever has been before.”
Shout 'Amen'
Indeed, it’s hard not to feel drawn into a joyful spirit of worship, with a professional choir singing upbeat music with unexpected bursts of harmony. On the first Sunday of February, singers accompanied by keyboards, drums, bass, and saxophone began the service with a rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Banners of green and red hung on the back wall of the sanctuary – one bearing the silhouette of the continent of Africa.
Applause punctuated the Mass, particularly after a stellar and heartfelt rendering of the responsorial psalm by a soloist.
Parishioners feel free to sway back and forth and clap their hands along with the choir. Some raise their arms in praise. Points made in homilies frequently elicit from members of the congregation an “Amen!” or other expressions of affirmation.
On its website, the parish reassures visitors: “We’re an expressive congregation; yes it’s OK to shout ‘Amen’ in this Catholic Church! We clap. We dance. We stomp and shout at times.”
Almost half of a typical Sunday congregation is not African American. Many whites and Hispanics and others are members of the parish.
Lourdes is staffed by priests of the Order of Preachers – the Dominicans. Preaching styles range from the more reserved to charismatic.
Rich history
Good homilies are important, of course, but they take on added importance when there are non-Catholics present.
“My husband's not Catholic, but even he really enjoys Lourdes,” said Nneka Soyinka, a young mother of Nigerian background who works for Mozilla. “Preaching is very important to him, and what he really enjoys from Lourdes, aside from the music, is also the homilies and the bonding and the [focus on] social justice and things that we really care about.”
A statue of the Dominican St. Martin de Porres graces the left side of the sanctuary – a nod to the Order of Preachers who now serve here. But the first priest in Lourdes’ history, her founder, was not Dominican, but from the Society of African Missions, Fr. Ignatius Lissner.
“His search for a site to build this mission was met with both anti-Black and anti-Catholic sentiment,” according to a brief history on the parish website.
“Fr. Lissner and Katharine Drexel had to essentially lie to get the property for where our church is located, to even get us into that neighborhood,” said parishioner Patricia Davenport.
It was Lissner who obtained financing from then-Mother Katharine Drexel, who was a wealthy heiress before she founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
The Atlanta mission, consisting of church, school and parish hall, was to be a memorial to the late Archbishop Patrick Ryan of Philadelphia and was called Our Lady of Lourdes in memory of the day on which he died, February 11, 1911, her feast day.
A great fire in 1917 destroyed over 2,000 mostly wood homes in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood, but Our Lady of Lourdes, with its stone and brick construction, survived, according to the Georgia Bulletin, newspaper of the archdiocese.
As recently as 2006, a parishioner was still able to recall being in the presence of St. Katharine Drexel. Nettie Singleton was a student at Lourdes School when Mother Drexel visited. She went with some of the sisters to the train station and helped carry Mother Drexel’s bags.
When Mother Drexel visited the classes, “she would go up and down the aisles, speaking to the students and looking at the work on your desk,” said Singleton, 97 at the time she was interviewed by the Georgia Bulletin. “I was nervous because I knew we were in the presence of high dignity.”
Civil Rights
The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament staffed Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School until 1974. The school closed in 2001, when the Archdiocese of Atlanta could no longer provide funding. It is now the Katharine Drexel Community Center, which includes church offices, Sunday school classrooms, a choir rehearsal hall, and the Drexel Institute for the Arts. It is also used as a parish hall.
Lourdes parishioners were involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Historian Leah Mickens has documented this in her 2022 book In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II.
“For older people, they would be involved through traditional organizations like trade unions, NAACP; they would give to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They would listen to lectures and participate in boycotts. And that seems to have been the case for older people in general, regardless of whether they were Catholic or Protestant,” Mickens told Aleteia. “And the younger people would have been involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, boycotts, more of like the direct action type things. So the issue for their participation was not about whether they were Catholic or Protestant, but the fact that they were Black; this was something that they all had to deal with.”
The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament at Lourdes were involved in at least one protest organized by Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., said Mickens, who based her book on an oral history project she conducted and on archival research. And sisters were present at the funeral of his son, assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Mickens’ book examines the parish’s response to both the Civil Rights movement and the contemporaneous Second Vatican Council. Lourdes went from the old Tridentine Mass that all Latin Catholics had through a series of changes in the 1960s and 1970s to a liturgy that inculturates African-American music and worship styles.
The advent of that inculturation was when parish membership “really started to take off, because until then, really, Our Lady of Lourdes was kind of an embarrassing relic of the past for most of the Archdiocese, or I should say for the hierarchy. And until then, for most of its history, Our Lady of Lourdes had been kind of this mission territory, like a home missions territory where rich white Catholics would send charity.”
Mickens pointed out that when the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament withdrew from Our Lady of Lourdes in 1974, the mother superior at the time said that the time had come for the parish to
“take into their own hands their community, and I think that was right because, I think that what we have seen is that since then, although it was very rough for the community in the ‘70s and ‘80s, is that by embracing these inculturated Masses and their whole history, one could say, is when it really began to transform itself from like the scrappy Jim Crow parish no one wanted or liked to a parish that I think really embodies the notion of the Beloved Community, because there are a surprising number of white people who go there. And I know the racial dynamics of the Catholic Church are very different from Protestantism. But even today, I think it's unusual to see that kind of relationship.”
The parish itself, on its website, says “We like to think that our parish is a testament to Dr. King’s civil rights dream fulfilled.”
"Beloved Community"
One aspect of that dream is the notion of a “Beloved Community,” which the King Center on its website describes as a “global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. ... Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”
Says the parish: “We welcome all races, cultures and faiths to our dynamic Mass."
Today, Lourdes regularly cooperates with other churches in the area and has a number of outreach ministries that keep it in touch with the broader community. The Palm Sunday procession begins at the King Center. Tourists visiting the center or the King childhood home see Lourdes and stop in.
And, from being a parish that was almost on the chopping block, Lourdes has been growing so much that it is planning a new and larger church. The parish motto sums up nicely what has really been the “Lourdes experience":
“A century of witness, a future of commitment.”
From a desire on the part of a white missionary to spiritually accompany a marginalized community through a historic time of change to a future of ecumenical cooperation for the common good, Our Lady of Lourdes has been and promises to continue to be a vital part of Atlanta’s community, both that of African Americans, and of Catholics.
