Edith Aguillard, Catholic church director in Bessemer, Alabama, expects new pope to be a bridge-builder

When Edith Aguillard moved to Birmingham from New Orleans nearly 35 years ago, she knew exactly what she wanted to find in her new city: a Catholic church.

“I went to churches everywhere,” she recalled. “I attended a church in Hoover, where I lived, but it just didn’t fit. So, I searched and searched.”

Aguillard, who came to the Magic City to work for a telephone company, brought something else when she arrived: her faith.

She describes herself as a “cradle Catholic,” someone who has been a Catholic from birth, raised in a Catholic family and typically received the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and First Communion since she was 4 weeks old. Aguillard found a home at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Bessemer, where she has been a parishioner for 32 years.

Being raised in a Catholic family, she remembers walking in her “grandmother’s shadow.”

“It was the most blessed piece of my life,” Aguillard said. “The Catholic parish I belonged to in New Orleans actually started in the driveway of my grandparents’ home. I followed every step that she walked. I was attached to her hip when she went to church and to different things.”

She recalled the Novena, an ancient tradition of devotional prayer that congregants did at Our Lady of Fátima. “I would follow my grandmother carrying that bag that had all of the prayer cards with her up through my high school years. Once that’s been embedded in you, it’s really hard to turn it off. It doesn’t just wear off. It’s there forever.”

Hearing that Robert Francis Prevost had been elected the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church “was overwhelming for me. I grew up with Pope John XXIII,” who served from 1958 to 1963 and was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis in 2014, Aguillard said.

Of the recently installed Pope Leo XIV, she said, “I think Pope Leo XIV is going to continue the work of Pope Francis. I think he will definitely be a builder of bridges.”

One of the pope’s alternative titles is that of Supreme Pontiff, or “bridge-builder.” According to the website Catholics Share, “In ancient Rome, it referred to priests who connected the human and divine through rituals.”

Pope Leo XIV is the successor to Pope Francis, who died April 21 at 88 after serving 12 years as leader of the global Catholic community.

‘Strong foundation’

Pope Leo XIV – the first North American and first person of Haitian and African American descent elected to serve as the Vicar of Christ (an alternative title that means the pope represents Christ on Earth) – also has ties to New Orleans, Aguillard said.

“Catholicism was one of the strongest things in New Orleans, where I grew up,” she said. “We all went to Catholic elementary schools. We all went to Catholic high schools. We all went to Catholic colleges – not us, but my friends did.

“It’s important to know that [Pope Leo XIV] had such a strong foundation as a young child with Catholic teachings. I don’t know what his history was, what he did as a child. … Most of the young men, they grow up in a Catholic church, they become an altar server, they become a deacon, some become priests – they grow up in that life of Catholicism,” she said.

Aguillard, 73, said life in the church has helped her in several ways.

“One of my favorite saints is St. Jude Thaddeus. … The Shrine of St. Jude is a big shrine in New Orleans; people come from all over the world to go to that shrine. There’s a Novena that happens every Tuesday in the city of New Orleans, and you go to that shrine daily. I had five miscarriages before I had my son, so I started praying in Novena to St. Jude, asking him to intercede for me and bring me through a healthy delivery with a healthy child. My son is named Travis Jude Aguillard.

“Yes, we go to Jesus,” Aguillard said. “Yes, indeed, I pray to God. But I ask these saints that I know are in connection with God to intercede for us. That’s what we do with the Blessed Mother. We ask her to intercede for us – ‘Go to your son. Can you ask your son for something? Can you ask your son to do this?’”

She continued, “When I was going through those struggles with pregnancy, I went to St. Jude. He’s the saint of the impossible. He’s the saint of things that just don’t happen to people. You don’t have just Catholics that pray to St. Jude. You have non-Catholics that pray to St. Jude because they have gone and asked for intercession and had their prayers answered.”

‘Love one another’

Since moving to Birmingham, Aguillard has done more than attend church. She has been on the board for the Office of Black Catholic Ministries; attended conferences and workshops; and been involved with the National Black Catholic Congress. She also has been a director of religious education for the past 25 years for the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham in Alabama, in addition to working with youth projects.

Last winter, her youth group collected clothes and brought them to people dealing with homelessness at Linn Park in Birmingham, Aguillard said. “At the end of this summer, we’re going to do it again. … My youth project with them is to take care of the unhoused.”

There are a few lessons Aguillard wants her students to absorb: “The love of God, the importance of knowing the Catholic faith, of knowing the growth of the Catholic faith and the need for them to be involved in God’s plan,” she said. “God tells us we need to be humble, we need to be united, we need to take care of each other, we need to love one another unconditionally as He loves us, and that is the basic teaching for all of it.”

She added, “We also look at their academics to see what they do. I had one young lady … and a young man, [both of whom] attend John Carroll Catholic High School, and they’re enriched in their Catholic faith. … They want to learn more; they want to do more; they want to understand more. … The teachings that happen in the Catholic schools and the teachings that happen in the Catholic churches are critical to their growth as lifelong Catholics.”

One of the challenges facing the Catholic church, like for many houses of worship, is attracting more young people.

Aguillard said, “We’ve had several Catholics that have left for whatever reason. … The focus right now is getting those Catholics back into our churches, filling those pews. We pray for that at every morning mass, that we bring our Catholic people back to the Catholic faith. Some of our youth have pulled away from the church … some of the kids want this ‘newness,’ and that’s what we’re trying to bring to the Catholic church – some newness and some freshness.”

Aguillard said Pope Francis was headed in that direction, and she expects Pope Leo XIV to continue by making the church more welcoming.

“What I’ve seen is that he is opening doors to the Vatican for political discussions for peace,” she said. Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, and J.D. Vance, U.S. vice president, were recent visitors to the Vatican, which serves as the spiritual and administrative center of the Roman Catholic Church. “He wants peace back into the world,” Aguillard said of the new pope.

“I think that’s going to be one of his biggest focuses, working with these different entities of bringing peace. … I think he’s going to be paramount in some of those decisions to do that. To watch him and to listen to him … when he started to talk about unity and started talking about peace and started talking about healing. … I’m going, ‘Hmm, you’re exactly what we’ve been praying about in all the churches.’ … I think we’re going to sit back and watch him make some strides in things that happen worldwide, and I’m ready for it.”