Saturday, November 02, 2013

Baltimore's Josephite Catholic order, founded to serve black community, celebrates heritage - baltimoresun.com

Baltimore's Josephite Catholic order, founded to serve black community, celebrates heritage - baltimoresun.com: Revered as a "gentleman in the finest sense of the word, remarkable convert-maker and a friend of the benighted," the Rev. Vincent Warren drove into rural Virginia one September night to share the word of God. He had no idea of what awaited.

A caravan of cars overtook his own. Hooded men in white robes forced him into one of their cars and drove off. They interrogated the cleric at gunpoint — "What are you doing in the area? Are you going to start a church?" — before releasing him hours later.

Warren was a priest of the Josephites, an order of the Roman Catholic Church founded in post-Civil War Baltimore to serve African-Americans. His captors were members of the Ku Klux Klan. The kidnapping was reported in a 1926 issue of The Harvest, the magazine that has chronicled the work of the Josephites for 125 years.