“But I had to show them they couldn’t silence me. “They hit me and beat me to a pulp, then shoved me under a car,” he recalled in an interview with The Times a few years ago. Several Klansmen attacked him outside the church. The consequences, for Barbour, were ugly. At a time when the Ku Klux Klan still operated openly, he welcomed a group of black college students into his congregation. In 1965, in the heat of the civil rights movement, he was assigned to a church in Georgia. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1960. After three years in the Navy, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Occidental College in 1956 and a master’s of divinity from General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1959. He eventually decided to become a priest in the Episcopal church, which allows its priests to be married. But he fell in love with his childhood sweetheart, Maryann Westbrook, and married her in 1953. Later, he considered becoming a monk after going on a retreat at Mt. “How do you make the church relevant in today’s very hectic environment, how can you take what is often portrayed as old-fashioned biblical text and make it come alive in our everyday lives? That was an area that was very important to him,” Hartwig said this week.īarbour, a native of Erwin, N.C., had felt drawn to the priesthood since childhood but resisted the calling for years. He also spoke from the pulpit about “how one lived with a plague,” church member Ron Hartwig recalled, and addressed not only those who had AIDS but their loved ones and others around them. He started an AIDS memorial book that listed the names of people from around the world and read from it every week. When parishioners with the disease died, he buried their ashes in an AIDS chapel that he dedicated to the memory of Blessed Damien of Molokai, who ministered to lepers in Hawaii. He marshaled church members to pack up to 200 lunches a week for AIDS and HIV patients at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. He presided over three or four funerals a week and visited hundreds of sick parishioners every month.īarbour established support groups for patients and their families. “He stood up to the prejudice and said the message of the Gospel is we should welcome everyone.”Īt the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Barbour was one of few priests of any denomination in Los Angeles who ministered to people with AIDS and HIV. Ian Elliott Davies, who succeeded Barbour as rector. “Carroll Barbour’s pastoral work with people with HIV and AIDS was really groundbreaking,” said the Rev. Thomas.īut soon the pews of the Gothic-style church on Hollywood Boulevard were even fuller than before, attracting families with children, as well as a large number of gay men and women, many of whom came from denominations where they had felt rejected. Some of those parishioners subsequently left St. His embrace of people with HIV and AIDS angered longtime parish members who tried, but failed, to have him removed.
He opened the church doors to people dying of the disease at a time when few places welcomed them. Thomas the Apostle Church in Hollywood in 1986, when AIDS was beginning to ravage the community. Carroll Barbour, a retired Episcopal priest who transformed a stodgy Hollywood church into a thriving spiritual haven for people with HIV and AIDS, died Tuesday at his home in Coto de Caza from complications of a pulmonary disorder.
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