Bishop John H. Ricard, first Black bishop of Baltimore and Pensacola-Tallahassee, dies at 86

Retired Bishop John H. Ricard, the first Black bishop of both the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla., and a nationally respected advocate for racial justice, died May 20 at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Washington, D.C. He was 86.

A Josephite priest whose ministry spanned parish life, Catholic education and national leadership, Bishop Ricard became one of the most influential Black Catholic voices in the United States during a time of important conversations about race, civil rights and the Church’s role in confronting injustice. He served as president of the Baltimore-based National Black Catholic Congress from its founding in 1987 until 2017.

“Bishop John Ricard’s death is a profound loss for our local Church and for the entire Catholic community in the United States,” Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori said. “As the first Black bishop in the history of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, he served this archdiocese with grace, humility and a joyful spirit that made him beloved by all who encountered him.”

Archbishop Lori said Bishop Ricard was “deeply committed to the dignity of every human life and he was unafraid to speak out against racism and injustice wherever he saw them.”

“He lived out the charism of the Josephites – showing a prophetic vision for the inclusion of Black Catholics in the life of the Church and an unwavering commitment to justice – right up to his last days,” Archbishop Lori said. “May his soul rest in peace.”

Bishop Ricard served as auxiliary bishop of Baltimore from 1984 to 1997, when Pope John Paul II appointed him bishop of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee. He retired in 2011 because of health concerns following a 2009 stroke and subsequent surgeries, but continued serving the Josephites in key leadership roles.

While serving as rector of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Washington, D.C., Bishop Ricard was elected superior general of the St. Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart in 2019 and reelected in 2023.

People who knew him on a personal level recalled his kindness, his sense of humor and his approachability.

A’dell Lee, a parishioner of New All Saints in Liberty Heights who served as Bishop Ricard’s senior administrator at the Josephites for more than a decade, described him as the kind of person who “would give you the shirt off his back.”

She recalled one time when he went across the street to his doctor’s office when it was cold and snowing, and he met a homeless man. After his appointment, he came back and got his tennis shoes from under his bed.

“He put them in a bag, and he walked them across the street (and gave them) to the gentleman on the bench who had no shoes,” Lee told the Catholic Review.

Then-Father Ricard, 44, was pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Washington when he was named a bishop and appointed auxiliary of Baltimore. The priest was pouring concrete when he got the news, according to Josephite Father Donald Fest. After the call, the pastor went back and finished the job, Father Fest said.

He had a “sense of doing the job,” said Father Fest, a former longtime pastor of St. Veronica in Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood and currently pastor of St. Joseph in Alexandria, Va.

“In Baltimore, he was in great demand,” Father Fest said. “You wanted to hear Bishop Ricard. He was youthful. He was congenial and approachable.”

People wanted him “any time you needed a bishop” for a significant parish occasion, he said.

Daniel Medinger, who served as editor of the Catholic Review from 1986 to 2009, said he used to try running with Bishop Ricard, who lived at St. Francis Xavier Church in East Baltimore when he was auxiliary bishop for 13 years.

“It was almost impossible to run … because people would just come out and stop him and want to talk to him,” said Medinger, who worked with Bishop Ricard over the last several years in the production of The Josephite Harvest, the national quarterly magazine of the Josephites. “He was a star. He was a celebrity.”

Shortly after he was named to Baltimore, Bishop Ricard was speaking out on national issues, often tying them to the local community. In 1985, Bishop Ricard wrote to Baltimore Jewish leaders deploring remarks by Louis Farrakhan, a Black Muslim leader; the bishop called the remarks anti-Jewish. 

As urban vicar of Baltimore, Bishop Ricard was responsible for parishes within the city. In 1996, he and a committee of suburban and urban pastors initiated a project to encourage Catholics in the Baltimore metropolitan area to look at social and economic issues – such as white flight – from a regional and faith perspective. The program, “Beyond the Boundaries: New Challenges of Faith in Metropolitan Baltimore,” officially launched in 1998 under Baltimore Auxiliary Bishop P. Francis Murphy.

One person Bishop Ricard influenced was Kirk Noble Bloodsworth of Cambridge, who was convicted of murder and became a Catholic while he sat on Maryland’s death row. His conviction was overturned in 1993 but, during the lengthy appeals process, the bishop and others accompanied him spiritually.

In 2008, Bloodsworth was named to the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment.

“Bishop Ricard ushered me into the (Catholic) Church while I was in prison. Around the same time, I found out about DNA testing and its power. It’s been some journey,” he told the Catholic Review after his appointment.

During the first free elections in South Africa following the collapse of apartheid, Bishop Ricard served as an official electoral observer in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, April 26-29, 1994. In a 2013 interview with the Catholic Review, he called it a “great, life-changing experience” to witness thousands of South Africans of all races vote.

“It was a very exhilarating experience to see old enemies finally reconciling and to actually see the birth of a country,” he said. “We saw people who had never voted in their life – old people and young people. It was a period of joy and jubilation.”

Bishop Ricard credited Nelson Mandela, the man South Africans elected as their president, for being a driving force behind making the historic election possible and for overseeing a peaceful political transition.

While in Baltimore, Bishop Ricard had been active in the anti-apartheid movement, participating in prayer vigils and anti-apartheid planning sessions in Baltimore and Washington. He put pressure on the U.S. Congress, the Reagan administration and the State Department to support sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Bishop Ricard met Mandela during a 1990 visit to the Riverside Church in New York after Mandela’s release from prison.

Bishop Ricard served on the Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services board of directors as treasurer from 1992 to 1995 before being named president and chairman in December 1995. He served two consecutive three-year terms in that position. 

When he was appointed president, he told the Catholic Review the causes of poverty, homelessness and hunger overseas or in Baltimore were similar. He said in all cases, they rob people of their self-worth and dignity.

The solution, too, was similar, he said: helping people discover their own strengths and capabilities and putting tools in their hands to develop education and skills for work.

Bishop Ricard was born Feb. 29, 1940; he was one of eight children. He sometimes joked that he was younger than his actual age, since he only had an official birthday each leap year, every four years. He attended parochial elementary and high schools in Baton Rouge, La., and attended Epiphany College in Newburgh, N.Y., and St. Joseph Seminary in Washington, D.C.

He was ordained a Josephite priest in 1968 and, in 2018, when the society celebrated 125 years of ministry, he told the Catholic Review he chose to join the society because he saw the Josephites as “unselfish men who served the African American community, often at the risk of ostracizing themselves from other priests and other Catholics.” 

“They lived in the same community we live, and they shared our values, our aspirations, our dreams and were very supportive of what we were trying to do.”

In 1970, then-Father Ricard earned a master’s degree from Tulane University in New Orleans; in 1984 he earned a doctorate from The Catholic University of America, Washington. 

He was an associate professor at Tulane University, 1970-71, and an adjunct associate professor at Catholic University, 1973-80. He also was consultor general for the Josephite Fathers, 1978-81. He was associate pastor at St. Peter Claver Church in New Orleans and pastor at three parishes in Washington before he was named auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1984.

Lee, of New All Saints, and Josephite Father Ray Bomberger, who served as vicar general of the Josephites while Bishop Ricard was superior, spoke of how the bishop counseled the young seminarians and continued to counsel the young priests, to ensure they were assigned to places that matched their gifts and abilities.

“He always had a great concern for fellow priests,” Father Bomberger told the Catholic Review. “He was always interested in helping people on that personal level.”

Father Bomberger, who first met Bishop Ricard in 1965 when they were both attending St. Joseph Seminary, said the bishop was “always thinking. His mind was always going, thinking ahead: What can we do better?”

“He always said, ‘Let’s look from the 30,000-feet perspective.’ He’s always trying to look at the big picture, to not get lost in the detail, but to build a vision from there for the things we do down here.”

Father Bomberger, a former pastor of St. Peter Claver and St. Pius V in West Baltimore, recalled that in 1968, after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, “he really led the seminary in running a series of workshops and seminars on civil rights and racial issues” for seminarians and parishioners.

In the 21st century, as president of the National Black Catholic Congress and head of the Josephites, Bishop Ricard served on a USCCB task force to deal with racial issues brought into public consciousness following a series of urban shootings that left both citizens and police officers among those dead.

In November 2014, after a Missouri grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a Black teenager, he told Catholic News Service that Catholics needed to return to the passion many of them showed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The bishop noted that many church leaders were at the forefront in integrating schools and fighting against racial discrimination in the 1950s and ’60s.

In a separate interview with CNS that same year, Bishop Ricard reflected on 50 years of the Civil Rights Act. The bishop was a seminarian in Washington when the act was passed.

“I grew up in the segregated South where everything was defined by race and segregation,” he said, adding that he always sensed that “law enforcement was there to maintain segregation and, if you crossed the line, you’d be in big trouble.” 

When he moved to Washington, it was very different because the city was “in transition, on the move – and like the rest of the country – in great change.”

But he said “racism is still a part of the fabric of our environment – of the air we breathe. It’s still part of the DNA of most Americans.”

He also said the issue can’t be addressed without recognizing that “whites, by and large, deny racism exists” and “black Americans, by and large, see it everywhere.”

Speaking to CNS in 2016, Bishop Ricard said that when he was growing up in Baton Rouge, the threat of being pulled over by police and arrested for something that even “hinted of going beyond the status quo” was very real to him. He said he and his friends “lived under constant threat of being arrested” during his teenage years.

The bishop told CNS that he, “like everyone else,” was dismayed by the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge July 5 of that year and Philando Castile a day later in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, by police officers, followed by the sniper shooting July 7 in Dallas that killed five police officers.

After this surge of shootings, he said, many people have been asking: “Where do we go from here and what does all this mean?”

Black Catholic leaders, in particular, were looking for ways to address the violence, racism and mistrust that were on full display during the shootings.

“They’re asking the church: ‘Give us some direction; show us some leadership. Show us our concerns are your concerns and that you are with us, because we see ourselves under siege in many ways,'” Bishop Ricard told CNS.

He called the violent actions a “wake-up call” but also said he also thought the Catholic Church has a lot to “bring to the table” to bridge racial divides, pointing out that the church has a long history of speaking up for civil rights. “We just have to recapture that,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do” to combat racism, he said.

In a May 21 statement, the Josephites asked for prayers for the repose of Bishop Ricard’s soul, for the Josephite community, his family, friends and all who mourn his passing.

“Bishop Ricard faithfully served the Catholic Church for decades through his ministry as a Josephite priest, counselor, educator, pastor, bishop, humanitarian and leader,” the statement said. “He devoted his life to the proclamation of the Gospel, humanitarian efforts worldwide, the mission of the Josephite Society, and the pastoral care of God’s people, especially within Black Catholic communities.”

Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

George P. Matysek Jr. contributed to this story.

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