Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In June of 2014, America literary editor Raymond Schroth, S.J., collected book recommendations from a number of Black theologians, including Kim R. Harris, Diana L. Hayes, the Rev. Bryan N. Massingale, Cecilia A. Moore and Andrew Prevot. Senior among the contributors was a giant of American Catholic history and a Black Catholic pioneer who would die less than a year later: Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. 

Father Davis (who, by the way, recommended Freeman, by Leonard Pitts) is probably best known to historians for his 1990 book The History of Black Catholics in the United States; in his review for America, Stephen J. Ochs wrote that “[f]or many years to come, this interesting and scholarly work will be the standard reference on African American Catholics.” However, Father Davis was also a prominent figure in the American church after the Second Vatican Council due to, among other achievements, his scholarship on theology, spirituality, pastoral care, Black women religious in the United States and the multifaceted history of Black Christianity on these shores. 

Born Clarence John Davis in Washington, D.C., in 1930, Davis was raised in a Congregational church but became Catholic as a teenager. He entered the Benedictine monastery of St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana (as its first first African-American monk) in 1949, taking Cyprian as his religious name. Ordained a priest in 1956, received his licentiate in sacred theology from The Catholic University of America a year later. In 1963, he earned a doctorate in historical sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

Returning to the United States that year, Father Davis participated in a number of civil rights actions in the following years, including the Selma to Montgomery marches that featured many other Christian clergy. He was also present at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington.

He also returned to St. Meinrad in 1963 to teach church history and serve as the archivist for the archabbey, continuing a relationship with the institution that would eventually surpass six decades. He also served as archivist for the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (of which he was a founding member) and belonged to the American Catholic Historical Association and the Society of American Archivists.

“As an archivist, Davis was not afraid of facing the ugliness of the Church’s history head on and exploited this history to bolster the physical, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual resilience of the African American Catholic community,” wrote Juán-Pabló González of The Catholic University of America in 2018. “Davis understood that the darkness of the past was inextricable from the light of the future, so he sought to prepare African American Catholics for a church that was in many ways no different from the world around it because the church had been historically and contemporaneously a hostile space for African Americans that would require the acuity of self-knowledge to navigate and to repair the institution. It was an incredibly bold way to usher in the spirit of reparation, through directly living out the Church’s values of human dignity and the mandate to protect the sacred nature of life.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, he made significant contributions to two pastoral letters: “Brothers and Sisters to Us” from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and “What We Have Seen and Heard” from the nation’s Black bishops. He was also willing to criticize the U.S. bishops: When they issued “Heritage and Hope: Evangelization in the United States” in 1990, Father Davis pointed out a significant whitewash on some issues, including a lack of acknowledgment that many “bishops, priests, religious men and women, and institutions such as convents, monasteries and seminaries in the United States had their slaves.”

In the first of a number of articles he would write for America, Father Davis wrote in 1980 of the unique role of the Black Catholic community in U.S. history:

[T]o speak to the church in this coun­try, about justice and brotherhood in terms of the church’s own tradition, to speak to their fellow black men and women in terms of the church’s universal call to all people and to speak to the nation in terms of the church’s real identity as “catholic” in a racist society. It is because of the existence of the black community within the Cath­olic Church from the very beginning of its existence in this country that the history of the Catholic Church in this country is unique.

A decade later, The History of Black Catholics in the United States appeared. His other books include Christ’s Image in Black: The Black Catholic Community Before the Civil War, The Church: A Living Heritage and To Prefer Nothing to Christ. He also co-authored Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States with Diana Hayes and Stamped With the Image of God: African Americans as God’s Image in Black with Dominican Sister Jamie T. Phelps, O.P. 

In the opening chapter of The History of Black Catholics in the United States, Davis wrote that “in the rich background of church history, there are images that we have chosen not to see, figures that have been allowed to blur, characters passing through center stage for a brief moment with no supporting cast. Still, they have been there, and the church has been marked by their blackness.” For a historian, then, the task is “to make the past speak, to highlight what has been hidden, and to retrieve a mislaid memory.”

Such mislaid memories could obfuscate not only the suffering Black Catholics had faced in American history, but also their triumphs and gifts to the larger church. “Our spiritual gifts have been the lives and works of countless people who have walked, and walk still, in the sight of God,” he wrote in a 2012 article for U.S. Catholic. “Despite the violence of chains, ropes, and whips; despite the pettiness and the rejection, they have built up the church and made her holy.”

Father Davis died at the age of 84 in 2015. His funeral Mass was celebrated at St. Meinrad. A year later, Father Massingale wrote of his impact in a tribute in the ​​Journal of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium. “There are few scholars whose works can be called ‘seminal,’ ‘ground-breaking,’ ‘essential,’ and ‘indispensable.’ Cyprian’s works richly merit these descriptions,” he wrote.

“Father Cyprian Davis was a significant leader as a Benedictine monk and priest of St. Meinrad Archabbey and as a spiritual writer, historian, and advocate for the vibrant presence of African-American Catholic leaders,” said Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., then-president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, in a statement after Father Davis’s death. “Most of all, Father Cyprian was a humble child of God who sought in an unassuming way to live a life of holiness and to place his considerable talents at the service of Christ and his church.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “One,” by Julia Alvarez. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

Correction (2/18/26): A previous version of this article stated that St. Meinrad Abbey is in Kentucky. It is in Indiana.

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.