Société des Missions Africaines – Province des Etats-Unis

né le 14 octobre 1880 à Hindlingen dans le diocèse de Strasbourg, France membre de la SMA le 14 octobre 1901 prêtre le 19 juillet 1903 décédé le 27 septembre 1949

1903-1904 Cork 1904-1907 missionnaire en Egypte 1909-1935 missionnaire en Géorgie, USA 1935-1936 Haguenau, directeur spirituel 1936-1937 Mulhouse, aumônier 1937-1949 Saint-Louis, USA, quêteur de messes vicaire à New York en 1939 décédé à Teaneck, Etats-Unis, le 27 septembre 1949, à l’âge de 69 ans

A Teaneck (U.S.A.), le 27 septembre 1949, retour à Dieu du père Alfred Laubé, à l'âge de 69 ans.

Alfred Laubé naquit à Hindlingen, dans le diocèse de Strasbourg, en 1880. Il fit ses études à Keer, Richelieu et Lyon. Il fit le serment en 1901 et fut ordonné prêtre en juin 1903. Après un court séjour à Cork, le père Laubé, en 1905, partait pour la préfecture du Delta du Nil.

Il y travailla comme vicaire du père Chabert, à Zagazig. Malade, il dut revenir en Europe dès 1907. C'était l'année où la Société prenait en charge les missions pour les Noirs en Géorgie. Le père Laubé partit rejoindre le père Lissner.

En 1909, il fondait la paroisse de l'Immaculée-Conception à Augusta. Il y travailla avec zèle pendant plus de 25 ans. Il fonda aussi une école qui donna les meilleurs résultats et organisa des mouvements de jeunesse, en particulier le scoutisme. En 1938, par suite de diverses difficultés, il revenait en Alsace et résida à Mulhouse.

Bientôt, il retourna en Géorgie, rendit service à Tenafly, avant de mourir à l'hôpital de Teaneck, dans l'Etat du New-Jersey.

Father Alfred Joseph LAUBÉ (1880 - 1949)

Alfred Joseph Laube was born in Hindlingen, Alsace-Lorraine, in the diocese of Strasbourg on October 15, 1880.
He died in Holy Name Hospital, Teaneck, NJ, USA, on September 27, 1949.

Alfred Laube was born of Swiss parents. His father, who died when Alfred was eight, was superintendent of schools in the local district. Alfred received his elementary education in the schools of his native city. He then entered the Society’s apostolic school, at Keer, near Maastrict, Holland, where he received his classical education. He then entered the Society’s house at Clermont-Ferrand, where he made his novitiate. Alfred studied philosophy and theology in the Society’s major seminary, at Cours Gambetta, Lyon (1897-1903). Alfred was admitted as a member of the Society on October 14, 1901. When ready for ordination he was found under the canonical age. However Pope Leo XIII granted him the necessary dispensation and he was ordained in the Seminary Chapel at Lyon on July 19, 1903. Pope Leo died on the following day.

Alfred was ordained at a time when there was a growing need for English-speaking missionaries to staff the Society’s Missions in British West Africa – where education and all Government business was conducted through the medium of English. English was also required for the Society’s missions in Egypt. For some years newly-ordained members of the Society were sent from the continent to the Society’s House in Wilton, Cork, Ireland, to learn English. This was Alfred’s first assignment after ordination. Twelve months later, he was appointed to the Vicariate of the Nile Delta, in Egypt. Here his life was several times endangered by the Bedouins; and he was saved on one occasion by an Arab he had befriended. An account of his experiences in Egypt, written by his kinsman, Clifford Laube of the New York Times, appeared in The Catholic News during 1948. When Alfred’s health became seriously impaired he returned to France to convalesce. Two years later, in 1909, he went to assist Fr. Ignace Lissner, who had been sent to America in response from Bishop Keiley of Savannah-Atlanta some years previously to establish missions to African-Americans in his diocese. He traveled with a second Alsatian missionary, Fr. Eugene Peter. On arrival both were posted to Augusta, Georgia, with the instruction to found a mission parish which was to be named after the Immaculate Conception. Progress was slow in the early years but gradually a community was established. The first parish church, school and rectory was an abandoned store which they were able to hire at a reasonable rate – because a man had hanged himself in it not long before. Four people attended their first Mass and thirty-five children were enrolled in the first school class. In 1913 when Eugene Peter was transferred to pioneer another parish, Alfred was made Pastor of Immaculate Conception and commenced work on a new church, rectory and school. Situated at 1016 Gwinnett Street, these buildings were completed by December of the same year. A parish hall was added after the Great War.

Alfred was to labor in Immaculate Conception parish for twenty-two years. On the occasion of the parish’s silver jubilee, in 1934, the Bulletin of the Catholic Layman’s Association of Georgia recorded that ‘after 25 years of toil and sacrifice, Immaculate Conception has a splendid church, one of the most substantial schools in the city, a comfortable rectory and a commodious parish hall, one of the finest groups of buildings in the South, or anywhere in the nation, devoted to the work of the colored people’. By that time there were over 400 children in the school which provided complete grade and high-school education taught by a staff of seven Franciscan Sisters. Moreover, over 2,000 baptisms had taken place since the parish’s foundation, most of them administered by Alfred. ‘Seven girls, high-school graduates’, the report concluded, had ‘entered the religious life in Colored Orders of Sisters in New Orleans and elsewhere’. One of the early highlights of the parish, which provided great encouragement to the community and which was covered widely in the newspapers of the time, was the visit during December 1923 of the first African-American priest, Fr Joseph Aloysius John. ‘Fr John is the idol of the town’, Alfred wrote to his superiors. ‘At the two services Sunday morning and evening the church was filled. Monday at a meeting in the hall there was no standing room –he will leave Monday – thanks for having sent him to us’.

(Fr. John had been born in the island of Carriacou, in the British West Indies. He studied in Epiphany College, Baltimore and Laval University, Quebec. He was accepted by the White Fathers in 1915 and sent to make his novitiate in Holland. In 1916 he was transferred to Carthage to complete his studies for priesthood but his health broke down. In 1917 he returned to New York. Four years later, in 1921, he was one of the first students to enter a seminary founded in Tenafly NJ, for the education of Black and White Americans. This seminary was founded by none other than Ignace Lissner SMA, founder of the Society’s works in America. Joseph was ordained by the ex-Vicar Apostolic of Jamaica, Bishop Collins SJ, on June 13, 1923, celebrating his first mass in the Church of St. Benedict the Moor, New York. After his ordination he remained for a little over a year in the SMA Mission House at Tenafly. Later he was assigned to Louisville, Kentucky where between 1924-26. Next he went to Corpus Christi, Texas, however here, as in Kentucky prejudice prevented him obtaining a permanent appointment. In 1928 Joseph was accepted into the diocese of Port-of-Spain and took up an appointment in the southern parish of Cedros, Trinidad. In 1943, en route to retire in Carriacou, he fell ill and died in the hospital at San Fernando, on September 3.)

Alfred returned to Europe on leave in 1935 to visit his mother who was then 83 years old. During this trip his superiors in the Alsace Province of the Society wished to retain him for a home assignment. The reaction from Augusta was overwhelmingly hostile. Edward C. Kramer, Director General of the Catholic Board for Mission Work among the Colored People, wrote :’I was shocked and could have cried when I read that you were not to return to your mission… your removal from Augusta is the most egregious and monumental mistake in all my more than 13 years of association with the Negro work.’ Bishop Michael J. Keyes of Savannah, too, was unhappy with the reassignment and the reasons given, when he wrote to Alsatian Provincial: ‘I know well that you have the power to take away any of your priests from Georgia…But I think in this case you are continuing the mistake that has been made in Georgia in the past’. Bishop Keyes was referring to other changes of personnel that had been made by the SMA in the past which he attributed to ‘wrongful reports’. He added: ‘If Fr. Laube is so persona non grata to the Colored People of Augusta, why is it that the Bishop of the diocese, who lives in the diocese, has not been informed of this?’ The truth was that Fr. Laube and Fr. Lissner, Superior of the American branch, were not seeing eye to eye. Maurice Slattery, the Superior General, mediated and eventually in November 1937 with the consent of the Alsatian Provincial he re-assigned Alfred to America, to works under the aegis of the Irish Province. He was sent to Lima, East St. Louis Mission, under the direction of Peter Harrington, Superior of the Irish Province’s works. Whether the new arrangement proved satisfactory is unknown. However within a year Alfred was working, not for the American Branch, or the Alsatian Province, but for the Generalate, supplying in parishes in return for stipends which were sent to Lyon. In 1940 Alfred applied to the Superior General for permission to retire from the Society to nurse his sister who had become blind, but Fr. Slattery urged him to continue with his fund-raising work. March 1946 found him in Charleston, sending 600 Mass Stipends to Tenafly each month.

When Alfred heard news that an American Province was about to be erected, in 1946, he expressed a strong desire to become a founding member. All differences now put aside, Fr. Lissner gratefully accepted his application. In September 1946 he was assigned briefly as administrator of Our Lady of Mercy Church, Charleston, SC. In October of the same year, his assignment finished, Peter Harrington, now Provincial of the new Province, appointed him to assist John Sweeney in producing a magazine. However this was an unsuitable assignment for a man whose command of English was incomplete and it was not surprising that in January 1947 he was re-assigned to the Georgia Missions, as Pastor-Superior of St. Peter Claver’s parish, Macon. He must have been gratified to see the following sentence in his letter of appointment. Fr. Harrington had written: ‘when I presented your name to the Bishop of Savannah, he replied: “Fr. Laube needs no introduction in Georgia, and I feel sure he will duplicate at Macon his high missionary record at Augusta. He is mature in years and in experience and has always loved and still loves Colored Mission work.” Regrettably shortly after taking up his appointment Alfred’s health broke down and he was admitted to St. Joseph’s Infirmary, Atlanta, with serious cardiac problems. There was no other choice but to resign the posting and return to the Province’s headquarters, at Tenafly, NJ. During the following two years he was frequently hospitalized and died in Holy Name hospital, Teaneck

Although Alfred was not equipped to edit the Province’s magazine he could speak three languages, English, French and German, and during the Second World War served as a chaplain to three camps for German Prisoners-of-War in the South. Alfred was a friend of sisters of St. Theresa of the Little Flower. He visited Lisieux several times during his life and participated in the St. Theresa’s canonization ceremony in Rome.

He is buried in the SMA Community plot, Mount Carmel Cemetery, Tenafly, NJ, USA.