Ambassador of Justice

In race-troubled Detroit last week, at the Church of St. Benedict the Moor, Solemn High Mass was celebrated by a tall, handsome Negro whose brown face and hands contrasted dramatically with the shining white of his alb. The Rev. Dom Basil Matthews, O.S.B., reputedly the first of his race to be ordained a Benedictine priest, had been invited by the Roman Catholic diocese to further its drive for interracial amity.

Detroiters who turned out after Mass for the testimonial banquet in his honor were charmed by Father Matthews' urbane polish, his easy, fluid gestures, the Caribbean cadence of his speech. He told them: "It is sometimes alleged--not without some foundation in the past history of the culture-conflict of the Negro in the New World--that Negroes do not wish to be ministered to by priests of their own race. ... To say that in this year of grace and achievement, 1946, is ... a most vicious form of propaganda.. . . The business of salvation is not a racial enterprise. Christianity is an interracial economy in the mystical body of Christ. . . ."

Since 1941, when he first came to the U.S. to study, 35-year-old Father Matthews has been lecturing and teaching almost as much as he has been learning. His current schedule includes graduate courses in English at New York City's Fordham University (which this summer awarded him a Ph.D. in Sociology and Political Philosophy); completion of a book on Caribbean social forms; supervision of two research projects at Katherine Dunham's School of Dance and Theatre, where he also teaches philosophy; lectures to discussion groups, university students, etc.

Irresistible Vocation. Father Matthews' parents were school superintendents on Britain's tropical, oil-rich island of Trinidad. As a boy, young Basil often climbed the hill, eleven miles from Port of Spain, to visit the monastery of Mount St. Benedict, first West Indian outpost of the Benedictine order. Irresistibly drawn to "the splendor of the liturgical life" he found there, at 14 he was discussing his vocation with the prior.

Three years later Mount St. Benedict admitted him, gave him basic training and two years of philosophy, sent him on to the Benedictine College of Theology at Belgium's University of Louvain. Ordained a priest in 1935, Father Matthews took extension courses from University Correspondence College, Cambridge, came to the U.S. and Fordham on a scholarship in 1941.

For all his success in the U.S. and his opportunity for service there as "ambassador of interracial justice and charity," Father Matthews' heart and head belong to Trinidad and Mount St. Benedict. He looks forward to his return next spring to continue working on his chief study--the cultural forms of his own people as a matrix of the Gospel of Christ.

Says Father Matthews: "It holds just as true in religion as in politics. Any successful new system has got to be an organic outgrowth from the old one. Otherwise the new religion will be only a surface covering that can be taken off like you take off your coat at night. And to make the new religion grow organically out of the old, you've got to know the old inside out. . . . You've got to know the beliefs and customs of a people to know how they can best understand the Christian faith and accept it as their own."

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