The October 20 blessing of the Catholic Center at the Clark Atlanta University complex featured distinguished guests, African ritual and unabashed pride.

With balloons to mark a parking place for Archbishop James P. Lyke, OFM, and “It’s Cool to Be Catholic” T-shirts, students stepped out to proclaim that the Catholic identity is alive and well at AU.

“It important to have an event such as this,” said AU chaplain Father Edward branch. “It enables us to bring all kinds of people together.” Moreover, he said, it helps students establish who they are in a religious sense.

“To say you’re black and Catholic around here is cognitive dissonance, a study in contrasts,” he said. An event such as the campus Catholic Center blessing means “you no longer feel like you’re by yourself”

The official opening of the center was attended by some 200 people, including former Newman Club president Ben Gibson, who served in 1959, the year the organization began on campus.

Other alumni present were Atlanta City Councilman Thomas Cuffie and Odell Owens, who traveled from Cedartown with his wife, Vera, to be on hand for the event.

During an adaptation of Kenyan blessing rite, the congregation encircled the outside perimeter of the center and deposited offerings in a large African basket that was passed from one to another.

“Our contractor, R.A. Banks, and architect, Leon Allain, were the first” to put something in the basket, Father Branch said. “They offered a copy of the plans and keys to the center along with their donations.”

In the rite of blessing, Archbishop Lyke prayed that the center would be a place where “students, faculty and staff, imbued with the words of truth, will search for the wisdom that guides the Christian life and strive whole-heartedly to stand by Christ as their teacher.”

The Catholic Center, located on the Atlanta University campus at 165 James P. Brawley Drive, SW, serves as home for the Newman Club and includes a lounge and a study area, kitchen, chapel and library. Four AU students live at the center and serve as staff members, offering hospitality and peer-directed programs.

“It’s been anew experience for them, to talk about themselves as Catholic as often as they do,” Father Branch said of the center residents, adding that a new sign outside of the center has made a difference in the number of students coming by to investigate what the Catholic Center is all about.

“Our T-shirts are selling like hotcakes,” he said happily, and “the students do very well explaining themselves” and what being Catholic means to them.

The Center formalizes the presence of Catholic ministry on the Clark Atlanta University campus for students, faculty and alumni of the nation’s most prestigious black institutions of higher education. Father Branch is the first priest to be assigned there full-time. Formerly Catholic campus minister at Grambling State University in Louisiana, he came to serve at AU at the request of Archbishop Eugene A. Marino, SSJ.

--Thea Jarvis