When the priest arrived at Jesuits Bend,* about 15 miles south of New Orleans, he found a delegation of parishioners waiting for him at the mission chapel. "They were very polite," the Rev. Gerald Lewis, 31, said later. "They informed me that a Negro could not say Mass for a white congregation."
New Orleans' 79-year-old Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel, a famed enemy of segregation (three years ago he banned Jim Crow benches in New Orleans' Catholic churches), met the issue head-on but gently. Instead of cutting off the congregation from all spiritual ministrations, he merely...
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