A Cycle of Segregation and Integration: The Growth and Evolution of Catholicism in North Carolina (2011)

Undergraduate: Lindsay Ruebens

Faculty Advisor: Ferrel Guillory
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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This project, presented as three long-form journalism articles, tells the story of how the Catholic Church has grown and evolved in North Carolina in the past half-century. The stories are all commonly linked by the parish in Newton Grove, N.C., called Our Lady of Guadalupe. The church made its mark in history when the bishop desegregated two churches on the parish property by melding the black church with the white church in 1953. Today, the parish is mostly Latino, and one article examines how the Catholic Church is struggling to integrate Latino Catholicism with mainstream American Catholicism. Another article also looks at how African Americans have impacted the Church in North Carolina. The third article features the career of Monsignor John Wall, who has both witnessed and actively been a part of the state’s many changes in Catholicism for the past 50 years. These stories all have a common thread: They tell how the migration of people and interactions between different groups have shaped Catholicism in North Carolina today.