Here in Ohio, we are blessed to claim many important figures in Black history as part of our state’s story: from poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar and actor Halle Berry to athletes Jesse Owens and Edwin C. Moses. Black History Month in February gives us the opportunity to reflect on and learn from the lives and contributions of such important figures. For Catholics, a Black Ohioan holds special significance: Father Clarence Joseph Rivers (1931-2004), a priest of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
The first of many fascinating features of Father Rivers’ story is that he became a priest at all. His family moved from Selma, Alabama to Cincinnati in the 1930s as part of the Great Migration of Blacks from the Jim Crow South to the North in the 20th century in search of fairer treatment and opportunity. To say that Father Rivers was the first Black priest to be trained and ordained in Cincinnati, Ohio, is not to say he was the first Black man to experience a vocation to the holy priesthood and answer it. Despite Vatican encouragement to ordain Black men, entrenched racism after the Civil War in this country created a dearth of Black priests — one that lingers now. In his foundational book, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, Father Cyprian Davis, OSB shows through letters and other primary sources how Vatican officials encouraged the U.S. hierarchy to actively foster an indigenous clergy in the U.S., including Black men, because they understood the importance of representative clergy to global missionary efforts. But racism is a powerful force. Even the idea of a Black man with the authority of a Roman collar was frightening to some. In the early 1920s, Ku Klux Klan propagandists like Daisy Douglas Barr in Indiana spread rumors that the Roman Catholic Church was “training ‘100,000 Negroes’ to be priests”[1] in order to frighten White citizens. The timing of Barr’s comment points to the establishment in 1920 of a seminary for Black men in Mississippi by the Society of the Divine Word. Such a seminary was needed because, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, despite continuing Vatican encouragement, Black men and would-be women religious were systematically barred from most seminaries and houses of formation solely on the basis of their race.
But to dwell on the racism that, a decade earlier, might have kept Father Rivers from the holy priesthood is to neglect the hopeful story of the talent and insight he brought to American Catholicism, especially Catholic liturgy, in his ministry as a priest.
Why was Father Rivers so significant to the way Catholics worship?
Clarence Rivers fell in love with the liturgy when he was in fourth grade at St. Ann’s School in Cincinnati. Serving as an altar boy led not only to his conversion to Catholicism but to a deep devotion to the liturgy in all its transcendent beauty. As a seminarian, he received the same pre-Vatican II liturgical training as his peers (a survey of rubrics and laws governing worship), but his personal interest in liturgy caused him to seek out voice lessons, to practice conveying the Latin texts of Mass with understanding and conviction, to frequently visit Grailville, an intentional community outside Cincinnati that promoted the liturgical movement in the United States — a movement that helped usher in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the restoration of the Mass.
Father Rivers was ordained in 1956 on the eve of the Council. He was appointed associate pastor at St. Joseph’s Church, a mixed-race parish in Cincinnati. His head pastor, Father Clement J. Busemeyer, seeing Rivers’ affable nature and interest in the liturgy, asked him to help enliven parish liturgical participation, which he observed to be minimal and driven by that dour sense of obligation common to the time. Rivers described Busemeyer, an older White priest, as very conservative, and yet he said conversation on worship in those times was not divided along ideological lines,[2] as it so often is today. Indeed, Father Busemeyer offered a historical example of the pervasive and uncontroversial desire for the reform of the liturgy among the clergy in the years leading up to Vatican II — a desire inherently conservative in its aim to preserve what lies at the heart of our worship,[3] then and now — the participation in the Paschal Mystery of Christ — but which had become obscured by an accretion of ritual elements and a heavy European cultural aesthetic. Conservative Father Busemeyer’s pastoral request of Father Rivers helps Catholics understand the overwhelming vote in Rome among the Bishops of the world at the Second Vatican Council to ratify the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy: 2,147 in favor, four against.[4] The time for renewal had come.
Father Rivers thought music might be just the ticket to enlivening worship at St. Joseph. At this time, liturgical music in parishes (if there was any; silence was the norm) would have been limited to European art music or chant performed by a choir.[5] The common thinking at the time was that only European forms of music possessed the reverence needed for inclusion in liturgy. Even before the reforms of Vatican II would give him permission to do so, in a few short years, Father Rivers began to compose music for liturgy that reached beyond the dominant cultural idioms of his day. His first composition, “God Is Love,” not only inspirited the parishioners at St. Joseph but became a national and international sensation among Catholics and other Christians after its release in 1963 by World Library of Sacred Music with other compositions by Father Rivers in An American Mass Program. Father Rivers was invited to sing “God is Love” as the communion song at the first Mass in English in St. Louis in 1964; he was reported to have received a 10-minute standing ovation. Eventually, his compositions would be performed by the Cincinnati Symphony orchestra, at the Newport Jazz Festival and featured on national television.
Was Father Rivers’ music really that good? Short answer: yes. His compositions were unique and noteworthy in how they married the familiar, fluid tone of European chant he had loved as an altar boy with the soulful, earnest sensibilities of the spirituals, the cultural art of his own people. And importantly, “God is Love” opened up the world of Black sacred song — that foundational genre of American music — to Catholics of all backgrounds. Soon, awed by Father Rivers, other young composers like Ray Repp and Jan Michael Joncas were crafting songs for Catholic liturgy out of their own particular cultural contexts. The most successful of these composers took seriously the way Father Rivers tied a new cultural form to the Church’s existing traditions, creating a timeless work. Anyone who enjoys the contemporary liturgical music used in Catholic Mass today, as well as the freedom granted by the Second Vatican Council to express the “genius and talents of the various races and peoples”[6] within the liturgy owes a debt of gratitude to Father Rivers.
Father Rivers went on to a long and illustrious career as a liturgist, composer, teacher, clinician, author and scholar, delighting most of all in the art of presiding at liturgy. He was a lifelong advocate of worship that enables the person — the whole person, including their own particular culture, emotions and intellect — to encounter the living God and be transformed. For the witness of his ministry, for the song in his heart that he shared so generously with the Church, in this month of remembering Black history, Ohioans can proudly say, “Thanks be to God!” for Father Clarence Joseph Rivers.
Emily Strand is director of campus ministry at Ohio Dominican University and a Catholic parish musician and liturgist originally from Cincinnati. She interviewed Father Rivers as a graduate student just before his death in 2004 and has been fascinated by his career and legacy ever since. With Eric T. Styles, she is creator and host of the podcast Meet Father Rivers.
[1] Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Viking, 2023): 35.
[2] Fr. Clarence Joseph Rivers, interview by Emily Strand, March 17, 2002.
[3] William Bornhoft, “Confusing Beauty with Baroque,” PrayTell: Worship, Wit & Wisdom, December 13, 2014, https://praytellblog.com/index.php/2014/12/13/confusing-beauty-with-baroque/.
[4] Frederick R. McManus, “Liturgical Reform of Vatican II,” in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Peter E. Fink, SJ (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 1084.
[5] Ken Canedo, Keep the Fire Burning: The Folk Mass Revolution (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 2009), 14; Joseph Gelineau, Liturgical Assembly, Liturgical Song, translated by Paul Inwood (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 1999), 173.
[6] Vatican Council II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, paragraph 37, 1963.