COLCHESTER, Vt. (WCAX) – Father David Cray is literally at home on the campus of Saint Michael College in Colchester.
He lives here with 16 other priests with the title “The Superior General of the Society of Saint Edmund.” It’s a lofty title for a very down-to-earth guy.
The Edmundites are a progressive Catholic order. At one point they also had houses in Connecticut, Alabama, and New Orleans. Saint Mike’s is their last. In the school’s archive room, the 79-year-old looks at pictures that date back to his days as a novice.
The Irish Catholic from Boston started his vocation at 18 when he was a student at the college. He studied all over the world. “So, I’m going to England. So, I’m in a sailboat with my suitcase,” Crasy said, pointing to one staged photo.
But where he landed later in life was very much real. “August ‘89 — that’s my arrival,” Cray said.
Selma Alabama was the very heart of the Civil Rights movement in the ‘60s, a hotbed of unrest made famous by the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and that would later come to be known as “Bloody Sunday” for the brutality of the state troopers who attacked marchers.
James Perkins, the current mayor of Selma remembers that time vividly. “’Cause the same little Black boy that would hide under the bed of his grandmother when the clan would parade through our neighborhoods — that same little Black boy would become mayor of that city,” he said during an MLK remembrance held last Sunday in Burlington.
Cray was among those in the audience. “That alternative motive was a chance to see my friend David Cray one more time,” Perkins said of his visit. The two became friends when Crasy first arrived in the mostly Black community. The Edmundites had already had a strong presence in Selma going back to 1937.
“We weren’t converting anybody to Catholicism, we were advocating, we were Christian people advocating for the poor,” Cray said.
The young priest immersed himself in what he calls, “the Black way of life.”
Reporter Joe Carroll: How did it — your ministry — how did you become a different priest perhaps?
Father David Cray: Well, in that way, I learned that there are different spiritualities.
Even though he arrived close to 15 years after the March to Montgomery, some of the Old South hadn’t disappeared. Cray remembers being confronted with some of those sensibilities. “You know, ‘We hate Yankees, we hate Catholics, and we hate N-word lovers, and you all are all three!’ I didn’t respond. I kept doing what I was doing.
Reporter Joe Carroll: Do you wish you responded?
Father David Cray: Well, I was telling people… I wish I said, ‘You know, you are very perceptive.’
Cray spent eight years in Selma and has many fond memories. Like the moment an elderly Black woman saw him for the first time. “And she said, ‘Ain’t he pink?’ I can tell people, I’m not white, but pink.”
Colorful times indeed.