The Archbishop Stands Firm

In the garden of the archbishop's residence in New Orleans, a group of Roman Catholic women chatted and fingered their rosaries, waiting for the Most Reverend Joseph Francis Rummel, 85, to lead them on a Holy Week pilgrimage of prayer to the city's shrines. They studiously tried to ignore women pickets protesting the archbishop's excommunication the day before of three Roman Catholics who had opposed his decision to desegregate the city's Catholic schools.

Suddenly, as Rummel appeared, a distraught, dark-haired woman flung herself through the gathering and fell on her knees before him. "I ask your blessing," cried Mrs. Bernard J. Gaillot, 41, one of the three who had been named in the excommunication order. "But I am not apologizing. Look up to heaven and admit that you know it's God's law to segregate. Don't listen to Satan, listen to God." Startled, Rummel said nothing, and Mrs. Gaillot was led away by some of the women pilgrims. "May God have mercy on you!" she said to the archbishop as she rose from her knees.

Profession & Practice. That brief encounter between a Catholic woman and her archbishop expressed a profound turn of events in the South: the Catholic Church is finally resolving the contradiction between its profession and its practice in racial segregation. It is unmistakable church doctrine that segregation, in schools and churches, is against the law of God. Yet most Catholic priests and laymen, like Southerners of all faiths, have been brought up to believe in segregation.

It has fallen to Rummel, in his old age, to make the key decision. Born in Baden, Germany, Rummel grew up in the Gemiitlichkeit atmosphere of Manhattan's Yorkville district, and served in a number of New York City parishes, including one in Harlem, after his ordination in 1902. Named Bishop of Omaha in 1928, Rummel seven years later was appointed Archbishop of New Orleans, which boasts the largest Roman Catholic population (654,000) of any city in the Deep South.

Rummel applauded the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in public schools, and began to nudge his reluctant flock toward accepting segregation as "morally wrong and sinful." He eliminated "whites only" pews in New Orleans' churches in 1953, and two years later shut down a church whose white parishioners objected to the assignment of a Negro priest. Yet, despite the example of Joseph Cardinal Ritter, who began to integrate Catholic education in St. Louis in 1947, Rummel made no real effort to bring his own parochial schools into compliance.

For one reason, racism runs stronger in New Orleans than in St. Louis. For another, Rummers health has long been failing: besides suffering from glaucoma, he nearly died in 1960 of pneumonia, after a fall in which he broke an arm and a leg. But now New Orleans' public schools have been integrated, in token fashion, for more than a year, and last month Rummel ordered that the city's Catholic schools, which enroll almost half of New Orleans' white students, be completely desegregated in September. Privately, many Catholics credit Rummel's stiff stand to the influence of brisk new CoAdjutor Archbishop John Patrick Cody, 54, formerly of Kan sas City, who recently returned to New Orleans from a visit with Pope John.

Genesis 21. Whatever their feelings, most of New Orleans' Catholics swal lowed the order in silence. Not so Una Gaillot. The wife of a factory clerk and the head of a small racist outfit called Save Our Nation, Inc., she has two sons attending a Catholic high school, and holds an unshakable conviction that racial integration is a sin against God. She helped set up the picket lines around Rummel's residence, issued a flurry of mimeographed essays arguing that segre gation is authorized in the Bible. One scriptural text she cited was Genesis 21, which describes how Sara asks Abraham to cast out from his house the Egyptian concubine Hagar, whose son "shall not be heir with my son Isaac." On the assumption that no Egyptian can be white. Mrs. Gaillot argues that this passage "surely must mean no playing together in school." Biblical scholars dismiss her interpretation of this and other texts as ridiculously narrow-minded.

Rummel sent letters warning some of his segregationist parishioners against fur ther protest ; last week, as the complaints and picketing continued, he recognized that his decision to desegregate, if it was to mean anything, required stern enforcement. Along with Mrs. Gaillot, he formally excommunicated Leander Perez, 70, political boss of nearby Plaquemines Parish, and Jackson Ricau, 44, executive director of South Louisiana's Citizens Council. Although hundreds of Roman Catholics are technically excommunicated each year for such sins as marrying before a non-Catholic minister or joining the Masons, the penalty is seldom imposed these days upon specific, publicly named individuals unless the offense is of the stature of heresy. Until they confess their error, the three may not participate in the sacraments or in public worship, although they may enter churches and share in private prayers.

The excommunicants professed to be shocked by the order. Politician Perez, who had earlier urged parishioners to pay back the archbishop by withholding dollars from Sunday collections, insisted that he was still a Catholic--"regardless of Communist infiltration and the influence of the National Conference of Christians and Jews upon our church leaders." Mrs. Gaillot insisted that she would take the matter to the Pope himself. But there was small chance of a hearing in Rome. Both the Vatican and the apostolic delegate in Washington said they would refer her complaints right back to New Orleans' spiritual leader; and L'Osservatore Romano, quite obviously reflecting the views of the Holy See, praised Rummel's actions as "admirable."

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