In photo, Father Jeffery Ott stands with his mother Barbara Ott in Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Atlanta, Ga., one of the first firm footholds of black Catholicism in the city.
The little red church within earshot of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth house was rocking.
Addison LePlatte turned to me and whispered proudly in a Trinidadian lilt: “I bet you’ve never seen a parish like this one.”
He was right. I had not seen one quite like this musical Atlanta-based parish, called Our Lady of Lourdes.
Black women in royal blue gowns gracefully carried bowls of incense down the aisle; a saxophone wailed; tambourines thumped; and a black-robed choir swayed in front of a mixed-race audience.
It was as if a piece of New Orleans had been transported to Atlanta. As elsewhere in the country many of the parishioners were Katrina victims who had fled New Orleans.
Oddly, this rainbow of diversity —a reprise of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” — was held a stone’s throw from King’s birth house and across the street from the tomb for both King and Coretta Scott King. Ebenezer Baptist Church, once co-pastored by King and his father, was only blocks away.
And Our Lady of Lourdes offered history of its own. Archbishop Wilton Gregory, the first black archbishop of Atlanta, referred to it as the “mother church” of black Catholicism in that city. Archbishop Gregory presided at the colorful celebration at Lourdes on Sunday, Oct. 31.
The event was a homecoming of the Dominican Friars to this parish, according to Archbishop Gregory and Dominican Father David Caron, vicar provincial of the Dominican order based in New Orleans.
The new pastor, Father Jeffery Ott, was the embodiment of this return.
Now the saxophone, the choir in combination with purple and red plumes of the Knights of Peter Claver fluttering amidst the glistening sabers created a kaleidoscope of religious adoration in the midst of a mini-jazz set.
And above it all, as this pageant played out, a strong, soaring tenor voice rises. Parishioners craned their necks to see from whence the mellow strains were rising. A little girl turned to her mother excitedly and whispered: “It’s the pastor!…. The pastor’s singing!”
Whispers of surprise slithered through the congregation as they caught sight of the new pastor standing on the altar, microphone in hand.
His voice rose like the church incense through generations, from invoking the remembered wishes of a paternal grandmother, who had often dreamed of having “a priest in the family,” and a proud maternal grandmother who would always demand: “Didja make ‘em know who you was….who your people is….?”
I felt ripples of excitement. Father Ott is my nephew. I know how ecstatic my mother, his paternal grandmother, would have been this day.
The installation of a new pastor and reinstatement of the Dominican Friars as shepherds of the parish followed the departure of the church’s former pastor, Father John Adamsey, who stepped down this summer. The associate pastor, Dominican Father Bruce Schultz, is recovering from emphysema.
Lourdes was one of the first firm footholds of black Catholicism in Atlanta.
This showplace of Catholicism was born when Father Ignatius Lissner, 75 years ago, saw the need for a black church in segregated Atlanta. Braving both anti-black and anti-Catholic attitudes, Lissner purchased the current property on Boulevard Street in 1912. He received $16,000 to help with the building of the church from Mother Mary Katharine Drexel, a wealthy Pennsylvania heiress who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, an order she had established in 1891 to serve black and Indian people.
Father Ott believes that for him his arrival was a homecoming of spirit and soul.
“I feel like I was being prepared to pastor Lourdes since I was taught by St. Katharine Drexel’s sisters (elementary school—St. Peter Claver, New Orleans, and college—Xavier University of Louisiana)…. Two of her sisters were the first to suggest to me that I might have a vocation.”
He also said that his recent role at Xavier as campus ministry chaplain for the last seven years in New Orleans helped shape his current role.
“My time at Xavier and in New Orleans has been a good marinade,” he said. “It has seasoned me well.”
Prior to his ministry at Xavier, he graduated from Columbia University in New York with a master’s degree in urban planning from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 1990.
The urban planning may come in handy at his new urban parish which has parishioners scattered throughout the city. He is pastor of non-territorial parish. Its first members were from the nearby neighborhoods. But as time passed, the parish families were scattered all over the city.
The current membership includes families from expensive homes in suburbia who come back to their Lourdes’ home base, as well as a few elderly men and women still living in small project apartments and in old houses nearby.
It also continues to operate an adjacent school which is attended by the children of 20 or 30 poor families whose children receive scholarships to attend Lourdes school.
The membership rolls include six active white families and six Vietnamese families who attend church. In addition to being a historic parish in a revered location, the parish was also home to the New Orleans Katrina exiles.
As a result the Creole cooking, language and music have been transplanted to the parish. With the appointment of a native New Orleanian in the form of Jeffery Ott as pastor that homecoming seemed to become complete.
It was Martin Luther King who once described Sundays as the most segregated day of the week in America. The parish flies in the face of that criticism.
Father Ott seemed intent on expanding that mission even further as he assured the parishioners at his installation: “The future is bright, y’all!”
Dwight is a former reporter with The Philadelphia Inquirer, who is currently a freelance writer.
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