When Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory became the first African American cardinal in the history of the Catholic Church as he was elevated to the College of Cardinals on Nov. 28, 2020, some of his thoughts were far from Rome while he received his red hat during the consistory at St. Peter’s Basilica.
In a Jan. 15, 2025 interview with the Catholic Standard and Spanish-language El Pregonero newspapers of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese, the cardinal reflected on that moment.
“When the Holy Father placed the cardinal’s biretta on my head, the thoughts that filled my heart were thoughts of my own family, my mom and dad struggling to provide a good education for me and my two sisters. My wonderful grandmother, Etta Mae Duncan, who was so pivotal in my upbringing. I’ve said this before, she was a domestic. She worked as a housekeeper to provide the opportunity for her grandchildren to get a good education.
“I thought about that. I thought about the sacrifices that people have made in my own life, but also the sacrifices that African American Catholics, Catholics of color, have offered in their fidelity to our Church, their love for our Church, their faithfulness to the Catholic community that they love and have loved all of their lives.
“So I thought about history. How did I get here? How did this moment happen to me? And how grateful I am to have reaped the harvest of faith that was made possible by people in my own life, but (also by) people that I have never known, but were faithful Catholics who have fallen in love with the Catholic Church and that I just so happened to be the one to reap the benefit of their love and their devotion.”
On Oct. 25, 2020, the morning that Pope Francis named Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory as one of 13 new cardinals to be elevated at that Nov. 28 consistory, he said in a statement, “With a very grateful and humble heart, I thank Pope Francis for this appointment which will allow me to work more closely with him in caring for Christ’s Church.”
That morning, Cardinal-designate Gregory celebrated a 250th anniversary Mass for Holy Angels Parish in Avenue, which is located near St. Clement’s Island in Southern Maryland, where the first Catholic Mass in the English-speaking colonies was celebrated in 1634.
After that Mass, when asked what his elevation to the College of Cardinals meant to him personally, to be the first African American cardinal in the United States, and what that would mean to the nation’s Black Catholics, Cardinal-designate Gregory’s voice broke slightly as he said, “I’m deeply humbled. I know that I am reaping a harvest that millions of African American Catholics and people of color have planted. I am deeply grateful for the faith that they have lived so generously, so zealously and with such great devotion.”
Cardinal-designate Gregory said he saw his appointment as “another opportunity to serve and to care for the Church and to have the Church (of Washington) in closer union with Pope Francis.”
He added, “I hope it is a sign of the continued investment of the Church in the work of justice, peace and harmony among people.”
Cardinal Gregory was installed as Washington’s archbishop in May 2019, and he served in that role until Jan. 6, 2025, when Pope Francis accepted his resignation that he was required by Church law to submit when he turned 75 two years earlier on Dec. 7, 2022. Also on Jan. 6, 2025, Pope Francis named Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego as the new archbishop of Washington, and he will be installed on March 11 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Cardinal Gregory became Catholic and was inspired to become a priest after attending St. Carthage School in his native Chicago in 1958. He was ordained as a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1973, and he earned a doctorate in sacred liturgy from the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome in 1980.
After serving as a parish priest and seminary faculty member in Chicago and as a master of ceremonies to Cardinals John Cody and Joseph Bernardin, he was ordained an auxiliary bishop of Chicago in 1983.
In 1994, Bishop Gregory was installed as the bishop of Belleville, Illinois, where he served for the next 11 years. Bishop Gregory was elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2001 after serving three years as the vice president. During his service as the president of the USCCB from 2001 to 2004, the crisis of sex abuse by Catholic clergy escalated, and under his leadership, the bishops implemented the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.”
Pope Saint John Paul II appointed Bishop Gregory to serve as the archbishop of Atlanta, where he was installed in 2005 and served until Pope Francis named his as the seventh archbishop of Washington in 2019. Then-Archbishop Gregory became the first African American archbishop of Washington.
In one of his first parish visits as Washington’s new archbishop, he celebrated a Mass at St. Augustine Church, which was founded in 1858 by free men and women of color, including some who were emancipated from slavery, and it is known as the mother church for African American Catholics in the nation’s capital.
When then-Archbishop Gregory appeared in the doorway of St. Augustine Church that morning for the Mass, people there shouted for joy and gave him a spontaneous standing ovation.
St. Augustine’s pastor, Father Patrick Smith, said the parish was honored “to welcome you as the first African American archbishop of Washington.”
Father Smith noted the impact of a Catholic school on the new archbishop’s life, and also how St. Augustine’s founders started their parish to provide a Catholic school to Black children, and St. Augustine School continues serving neighborhood children today.
In his homily that day, then-Archbishop Gregory acknowledged St. Augustine’s history and “how it is identified with the sacred heritage of African American Catholics.”
“I stand on holy ground, as do all of you when you gather each Sunday for the Eucharist,” he said, adding, “Today a son of the African diaspora stands in your midst as the shepherd of the entire family of faith that is the Archdiocese of Washington.”
After Cardinal Gregory’s elevation to the College of Cardinals was announced in 2020, local Catholics interviewed for a Black Catholics Voices multimedia series for the Catholic Standard reacted with joy to his appointment as the first African American cardinal.
Father Robert Boxie III, the Catholic chaplain at Howard University in Washington, said the appointment was a recognition of Cardinal Gregory’s pastoral leadership and contributions to the Church in the United States, and it was also a recognition that “the faith, the contributions, the witness, the experience of Black Catholics truly do matter, and that’s an important voice and an important gift to the Church universal. The voice of Black Catholics will be now that much closer to the Holy Father. It will now be in the heart of the Church in Rome, in the Vatican.”
Sister Patricia Chappell, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur and the former president of the National Black Sisters’ Conference, called Cardinal Gregory’s elevation “a very historic moment,” and praised the new cardinal as “a man who really listens to the people, a man who is steeped in his faith, and a man who will journey with the people.”
As the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Gregory worked to be a pastor to all the people of The Archdiocese of Washington, centering his ministry on celebrating Masses at parishes and Catholic schools. He worked to bring healing in the wake of the clergy abuse crisis and led the archdiocese through the COVID-19 pandemic. Demonstrating Catholic teaching for the dignity of human life in all its stages, Cardinal Gregory celebrated a Youth Mass for Life before the annual March for Life, and he also spoke out against the death penalty. The cardinal also celebrated an annual Mass honoring the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and under his leadership, the archdiocese launched a 2020 pastoral initiative, “Made in God’s Image: Pray and Work to End this Sin of Racism,” and a 2021 action plan based on Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ environmental encyclical.
Reflecting in a recent interview on Cardinal Gregory’s service as the archbishop of Washington and how he made history as the first African American cardinal, Washington Auxiliary Bishop Roy Campbell Jr. – who also serves as the president of the National Black Catholic Congress – said, “He demonstrated to the Church in the United States that Black Catholics have a lot to offer to the Church from the gifts God has given us, and he’s an excellent example of that.”
In a 2021 interview one year after he was elevated to the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Gregory was asked if being the first African American cardinal posed any challenges, and he said, “I always feel that if I stay close to the Lord in my prayer life, at least (staying) on the right path, that being the first is an opportunity to draw the Church closer together across cultures and races.”
Cardinal Gregory reflected on that in his recent interview with the Catholic Standard and El Pregonero, noting, “You know, to be perfectly honest, I’ve had to be the first on many different occasions. The first African American bishop to serve in the Archdiocese of Chicago. The first African American bishop to be president of the Conference of Bishops. The first African American bishop here as the archbishop of Washington.
“So I have had a number of opportunities to be the first. And in accepting those opportunities, I also want to make sure that I realize that whatever legacy I leave will be available for the second, for the third, for the fifth, who will, in God’s own time and with God’s own grace, will inherit the responsibilities that I’ve been fortunate enough to have,” he said.
In that interview, Cardinal Gregory also said, “I hope that my presence in the Archdiocese of Washington, as I was present in Atlanta and in Belleville and in Chicago, I hope that I provided an opportunity for people not just in a sense of pride, but in a sense of opportunity, that the young people can see a world that they can fill with their own dreams and with their own possibilities. I hope that my ministry has lifted the horizons for a lot of our young people, to see as possibilities that generations of young people in the past never even envisioned.”
