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Remembering the Rev. Jerome LeDoux on Ash Wednesday [1]

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Date: 2025-03-05

Today, Ash Wednesday, marks the start of Lent, a 40-day period of fasting, prayer and abstinence.

“It is also a day of reflection for many in New Orleans, a very Catholic city,” Mardi Gras New Orleans states. “We go to church and get ashes on our forehead to show penance – the priest blesses us in the sign of a cross, symbolizing ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

During his time in New Orleans, the Rev. Jerome LeDoux marked several foreheads with ashes as pastor of St. Augustine Catholic Church, the oldest Black Catholic church in the United States.

Born in 1930 in Lake Charles, LeDoux graduated from the Society of the Divine Word’s all-Black St. Augustine’s Seminary in Bay St. Louis, Miss., in 1947. By 1952, he was the first Black priest serving in the South.

After earning a master’s degree in theology and a doctorate in canon law at Gregorian University in Rome, Italy in 1961, LeDoux taught theology at Xavier University of Louisiana. He became pastor of St. Augustine Catholic Church in 1990.

Considered a “maverick,” LeDoux added jazz, African drumming and dancing, Mardi Gras Indian chants and second line parades to his Masses. He wore dashiki vestments and Birkenstock sandals, and rode a donkey to church on Palm Sunday.

“Instead of standing behind a pulpit,” a 2019 Times-Picayune article states, “he walked around the church as he preached, putting his hand on shoulders and welcoming people by name…”

LeDoux was dismissed in 2006 after his congregation fought against plans to close the church and won. LeDoux died in Lafayette, La., in 2019.

“He wasn’t just a pastor or spiritual leader,” Treme resident Imani Simmons told the Louisiana Weekly in 2019. “He was a living legend .. a wise and sassy oracle and just this phenomenal human being.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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[1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2025/03/05/st-augustine-jerome-ledoux-ash-wednesday/

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