Catholicism's Black Maverick

By Richard N. Ostling

Until last year George Augustus Stallings Jr. was one of the most visible black priests in America's Roman Catholic Church. Today the flamboyant Washington preacher is the church's leading renegade. Stallings last July spurned church orders and formed his own African-American Catholic Congregation. This week he plans to push his defiance one step further by having himself consecrated a bishop. What's more, the 42-year-old priest has just become embroiled in scandal: a series in the Washington Post last week accused Stallings of questionable financial dealings and homosexual improprieties with three persons, one of them reportedly eleven years old when the relationship began.

Stallings originally based his break with Rome on what he called the Catholic Church's unwillingness to recognize the spiritual needs of African Americans. He also complained that the church did not recognize and nurture talent (presumably his own) and that James Cardinal Hickey had insisted he undergo psychiatric treatment. According to the Post, Hickey made the demand after years of frustration over Stallings' Lone Ranger tactics. Especially disturbing to Hickey, said the Post, were Stallings' refusal to live in a rectory and questions about whether the priest's expensively decorated private residence had been partly funded by church offerings. The archdiocese also received repeated allegations about homosexual activity but was unable to substantiate them.

Stallings characterized the Post's reporting as another "effort on the part of white media to discredit, destroy and defame African-American male leadership." He added, "After prayer, and consultation with my lawyer, I can't comment directly on the Post article." When the paper first published allegations of homosexuality last September, Stallings demanded that advertisers boycott the Post. The Archdiocese of Washington has maintained silence on the financial and sexual charges.

The allegations could slow or even reverse the growth of Stallings' empire. Since founding his original Imani Temple, which meets in a rented community center, Stallings has established satellite congregations in Norfolk, Va., Baltimore and Philadelphia. To date he has attracted several thousand disciples, both ex-Catholics and ex-Protestants. Stallings says he gives eight or ten speeches a month around the U.S., and each time he speaks, local blacks want to set up churches. But the priest of a second African-American congregation in Washington forsook Stallings last year.

Last February, after Stallings proclaimed his total split from Rome on the Phil Donahue show, the archdiocese excommunicated him and all Catholics in his flock. At that time, the priest announced that his organization had abandoned Catholic teachings against abortion, birth control, homosexual activity and remarriage after divorce. His planned consecration as a bishop this week is to be performed by a like-minded prelate from an obscure white denomination, Archbishop Richard Bridges of the Independent Old Catholic Church in Highland, Calif. As a bishop, Stallings will be able to ordain his own schismatic priests.

Though the newborn denomination is mostly middle class, says Stallings, it wants to offer "spiritual and cultural liberation" to poorer blacks as well. Says he: "We teach them that they can free themselves through their unique history and culture." Unfortunately, the pressing need for such cultural affirmation among the nation's 2 million black Catholics has become obscured, both by Stallings' schism and by the moral accusations against him.

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington