Notre Dame De Perpetuel Secours Church

The priests this parish waited for came from a single ordination class. In 1934 four Black men were ordained in the Society of the Divine Word: Anthony Bourges, Maurice Rousseve, Vincent Smith and Francis Wade. They met racial hatred inside the church and outside it. That same year Bishop Jeanmard of Lafayette welcomed Black priests into his diocese, which was organizing separate parishes for Black Catholics. The church's name is French for Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and the parish dates to 1938.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 0.3 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 0.3 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 1.3 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.2 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.

More markers nearby

• The Old Castillo Hotel — 0.3 mi
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — 0.3 mi
• Duchamp Opera House — 0.3 mi
• Evangeline Oak — 0.3 mi