“A MAN OF STEEL”: FATHER IGNATIUS LISSNER, S.M.A. (1867-1948)

April 18, 2012 By 4 Comments

The son of a Jewish convert, Ignatius Lissner was born in the Alsace region of France. At age twenty-one, he joined the Society of African Missions, known as the “White Fathers” (for the habits they wore), a French missionary order founded in 1856. He was ordained a priest in Lyons in 1891. (Three of his siblings followed him into the religious life.)

After ten years in Africa, Father Lissner was sent to America to promote the missions and raise funds. There he became strongly interested in the situation of African-American Catholics. In 1906, Bishop Benjamin Keily of Savannah, a diocese then encompassing the entire state of Georgia, contacted the White Fathers about ministering to the diocese’s Black Catholics. Father Lissner was sent to Georgia to direct the Black apostolate. Over the next fifteen years, Lissner founded seven parishes and six parochial schools.

In 1916, he and Mother Theodore Williams (1868-1931) founded a religious community for African-American women, the Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary. These were not easy years, as prejudice both within the Church and outside it were major obstacles. On the outside they had to deal with the Ku Klux Klan. On the inside, they faced a less than subtle racism. In Savannah, white sisters made racist comments about the new nuns, and the local bishop made snide references to Father Lissner’s own ancestry.

In 1921, Father Lissner founded St. Anthony’s Mission House in New Jersey, the nation’s only  racially integrated seminary. During its short life, several African-American priests were ordained. In the following years, Father Lissner founded several parishes and missions around the country. In 1941, he was named provincial of the American branch of his order. After his death in 1948, a confrere eulogized him:  


Fr. Lissner’s vocation was to work among the Colored. A gifted builder, he erected many schools, knowing (as he often repeated) that through those schools he would be able to reach out to the children and through them to their parents. But such work called for many sacrifices. The segregation of White and Black was the law of the land in the South. His strong determination to continue this work found opposition from the Klu Klux Klan, some White leaders and local priests and sometimes even from bishops. But Fr. Lissner was a man of steel. He braced himself against all opposition and criticism. Silently he suffered all kinds of injustices and continued tenaciously to preach the Gospel to his people.


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  • Anonymous

    Thanks very much for this. I'm an African-American Catholic who is a member of a parish in Georgia founded by St. Katharine Drexel in her ministry to AAs and Native Americans in the 1800s. Admittedly, I need to learn more of the history of African-American Catholics communities in the South. Perhaps this is what I needed to inspire me to act.

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/01469622835449220113 Dymphna

    Thank you for this. Pray for us Fr. Lissner!

  • Fr. Frank Eldridge

    Saint Odilia’s Church in Los Angeles, CA was founded in 1926 as “Saint Odilia’s Negro National Church”. Several years ago we placed a plaque in the church to commemorate its historical origins. In part it reads: “The realization of the vision of Father Lissner and the SMA Fatheres. The first African American Church established in the West…”
    The SMA Fathers ministered in the parish until 1992 and after that the Friars of the Atonement have staffed it. The parish continues to serve the largely Hispanic population in this South Central neighborhood. A school was opened in 1950 and is doing well.
    Saint Odilia is the patroness of Alsace.
    Many thanks for your historical note on Fr. Lissner.

    • http://www.maran-atha.us/ William Henry Roll

      Hello Frank. I’ve been looking for you, if you are the Frank Eldridge, son of Joseph and Dorothy Eldredge, and descendant of John Kidd and his wift Siche Booream. whroll@gmail.com