![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1000054143-292x300.jpg\")
Hosea Alexander with his wife, Genevieve, the day of his ordination as a deacon in 1975. (Alexander family)<\/p>\n
Alexander died July 9 at the age of 95. He was a convert who went on to mentor generations of permanent deacons while at the same time helping shape the archdiocese\u2019s outreach to Black Catholics<\/a>.<\/p>\n Born in Arkansas in 1930 to parents of Cherokee and African American heritage, Alexander was raised in St. Louis \u2014 mostly by his maternal grandparents \u2014 before enlisting in the Army in 1948. While he was never deployed, he earned multiple honors and promotions, along with a reputation as a talented boxer and football quarterback.<\/p>\n At Fort Riley, Kansas, Alexander made friends with the Catholic chaplain, Father Francis Xavier Murphy, CSsR, the same priest who would go on to write world-famous dispatches from the Second Vatican Council under the pen name Xavier Rynne<\/a>. Alexander had been raised Protestant, but had been attending Catholic Masses and had read St. Thomas Aquinas\u2019 \u201cSumma Theologica.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI can see, Mr. Alexander, that you already know all this stuff,\u201d Murphy told him as he was preparing to enter the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n After he was discharged, Alexander enrolled at the University of Notre Dame to study engineering. He met Genevieve while working a summer job in Los Angeles in 1955, a time when many Black and Creole families were migrating from the South to Southern California<\/a>. The couple married a few months later and eventually moved back to Indiana, where Alexander finished his degree in 1962, becoming one of the school\u2019s pioneering \u201cBlack Domer\u201d engineers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Returning to LA, he worked in early flight testing and fuel tank design for several major engineering firms, including NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Rocketdyne, and Hughes Aircraft.<\/p>\n But his time at Notre Dame had also given him something else that would change the direction of his life: a deep devotion to the school\u2019s namesake, the Virgin Mary.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything in his life centered around the Church and the rosary,\u201d said Elmer Pratt, a fellow Knight of St. Peter Claver and close friend of more than 30 years.<\/p>\n \u201cAt night, you were going to do a rosary,\u201d recalled the youngest of Alexander\u2019s five children, Vincent. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t like you were going to bed. You were going to do a rosary.\u201d<\/p>\n Pratt believes that devotion helped him discern his vocation to the diaconate. Hosea and Genevieve were parishioners at St. Agatha Church in Mid-City, and when their friends in a group of local African-American Catholics suggested he think about this recently restored ministry of the permanent diaconate.<\/p>\n \u201cAt that point in his life, he was a successful engineer in aerospace and could have stayed there, or could have just retired to almost anything,\u201d said Pratt. \u201cBut he retired basically to go into the deacon program.\u201d<\/p>\n Alexander\u2019s first years were a time of \u201cexperimentation\u201d as the Church was still figuring out exactly what deacons were supposed to do, said Deacon Peat Wilson, a friend of Alexander\u2019s who was ordained in 1982.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn the basic formation, they didn\u2019t know what to teach us, and the priests had no idea what to do with us,\u201d said Wilson, a deacon at St. Rose of Lima in Simi Valley. \u201cWe had no standard procedures. We had to develop those, and Hosea was one of those who stood up and spoke out about what should be done.\u201d<\/p>\n Later on, those experiences helped Alexander mentor generations of younger deacons. Wilson said Alexander always saw his mission as more about evangelizing the local community than simply administering sacraments.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn the African-American community, they didn\u2019t have enough people to get to the marketplace,\u201d said Wilson. \u201cOur first objective was to learn how to minister in the marketplace. That\u2019s why it was so wild, because nobody ever did anything like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Officially, Alexander served as a deacon at St. Agatha, and later, Holy Spirit in Mid-City and Holy Name of Jesus Church in LA\u2019s Jefferson Park area. But from the beginning, he was a deacon in demand.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWherever there is one Black person in a church, I want you to go preach there,\u201d Cardinal Manning told him after ordination.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cardinal Manning and his successor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, both turned to Alexander for advice on the permanent diaconate and outreach to Black Catholics.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe was truly a prophetic pioneer for the entire archdiocese, and he set a new standard for all permanent deacons who followed him,\u201d said Mahony, who often asked Alexander to assist him at confirmations and other liturgies in parishes with Black Catholics.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the years, Alexander added his own personal flavor to that ministry. He was known for his bilingual duets and, inspired by the story of King David processing with the Ark of the Covenant, would dance while carrying the Book of Gospels during the entrance procession at Mass. \u201cGod is good \u2026 all the time\u201d was one of his trademark lines, and his snappy recitation of a scriptural rosary became a staple at vigils for deceased parishioners.<\/p>\n Despite losing Genevieve in 2022 and undergoing health problems in his final years, Alexander stayed active to the end, helping lead nightly Zoom rosary sessions with Scripture readings, music, sharings, and prayers for the sick.<\/p>\n At his Aug. 14 funeral Mass at Holy Name of Jesus, an ensemble choir that included his son Vincent brought more than 300 people to their feet before, during, and after the Mass \u2014 just as Alexander would have wanted.<\/p>\n The funeral\u2019s celebrant, Archbishop Jos\u00e9 H. Gomez, observed that he\u2019d just been with more than 300 LA deacons for their annual gathering on Aug. 8, the feast of St. Lawrence Martyr, and called the size of their annual gathering a testament to Alexander\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat [Deacon Alexander] started has now turned into a huge blessing for the archdiocese,\u201d said the archbishop.<\/p>\n Alexander\u2019s son Eddie, an internal medicine doctor in Los Angeles, admitted that his father set an impossible standard for everyone else to follow, but never made a big deal out of it.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had a few extra gifts, let\u2019s put it that way.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t \t\t\tPablo Kay is the Editor-in-Chief of Angelus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hosea Alexander Sr. was a standout athlete, a military veteran, and a pioneering rocket scientist who worked on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-442930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JG_ForAngelus_Hosea_20260814_165-1024x683.jpg\")
Deacon Peat Wilson speaks at Alexander\u2019s funeral Mass at Holy of Name of Jesus Church Aug. 14. The two were friends over decades. (John Geronilla)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1000054147-1024x584.jpg\")
Deacon Alexander in 1997. (Alexander family)<\/p>\n![\"author](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ac244411beb47ff9266b87c9e3eb73e1.jpeg\")
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