Black Catholic Women

By: Diana L. Hayes

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Black Catholic Women

The first African women came to the Americas almost five hundred years ago as free settlers and slaves, speaking French and Spanish. They came as Catholics, Muslims, and followers of traditional African religions. All came bearing a deep and abiding faith in a God of creation, justice, and honor, in whatever way they named God. Their sacred worldview enabled them to survive, sustained by their belief in a “wonder working” God who would, in God's own time, free them from their captivity.

Slavery and the Antebellum Period

Some of the first names that come to light can be found in meticulously kept baptismal, marriage, and birth records of sixteenth century Catholic churches, such as those at St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the United States, and in Los Angeles, founded in the eighteenth century by eleven Catholic families, only two of whom were white. These records detail a rich history of the earliest period of black women's presence in North America.

Sister Suzette Jacques, probably c. 1890s.

Los Angeles Public Library, Shades of L. A. Collection

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Although some of these women were slaves, others were free. Free black women were to be found in the Florida and Louisiana territories where a unique class, the free colored or Creoles of color, came into existence. They were the racially mixed descendants of African, Spanish, and French settlers, possessed of rights and freedoms most free blacks elsewhere could not dream of having. In the English-speaking colonies, despite a significant number of black Catholics, no such group emerged. Usually, there were more free women of color than men because of their less threatening nature and their services, often sexual, to their owners.

Three free women of color, Coincoin (Marie Therese, 1742–1816) of Melrose Plantation, Louisiana; Mother Elizabeth Lange (1784–1882) of Baltimore, Maryland; and Mother Henriette de Lille (1813–1862) of New Orleans, Louisiana, despite their restricted circumstances, managed to create institutions or families that helped them to build and maintain the black communities that emerged as a result of their hard work, faith in God and themselves, and perseverance.

Coincoin was leased to a French merchant by whom she had ten children. It was only the church's disapproval of their relationship and her master's impending marriage that led him to free her and her youngest child. He also gave her land and a small annuity. Coincoin then began the remarkable quest of freeing, through her own means, all of her children and grandchildren. She built a community based upon family ties, which existed even into the twenty-first century and led to the founding of a black parish named for her eldest son.

The Catholic Church in the South was often helpful in aiding and encouraging free women of color. A supporter of slavery for centuries, the Church slowly came to realize slavery's inherent sinfulness and brutal dehumanization. It became, in many ways, the moral protector of these women and helped to educate them at a time when most white southern women were still uneducated. These skills and resourcefulness served them well in the years to come, especially in overcoming the racism and sexism that persisted within the Church hierarchy and among its members.

Albeit by different means, Mother Lange and Mother de Lille also had a significant influence on the black Catholic community. Both founded black women's religious orders in response to their desires to serve God and their fellow black Catholics and in rejection of the roles usually reserved for free women of color in American society, as either domestics, as in Baltimore, or concubines, as in New Orleans. They sought ways to help strengthen African Americans in their faith and self-understanding.

At a time when no white religious order would accept women of African descent, Elizabeth Lange, Henriette de Lille, and their sisters in the faith persisted in their efforts to develop religious institutions which provided education in the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as in skills such as sewing and cooking. They believed that because of their efforts, young black women would be prepared to move from lives of domestic drudgery, the fate of most black women, free or slave, into higher callings, including religious life.

Mother Lange founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in 1829 in Baltimore, while Mother de Lille founded the Sisters of the Holy Family in 1842 in New Orleans. They and other black women, such as Mother Mathilda Beasley of Georgia and Mother Theodore Williams, founder of the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, believed they and their people were called to a different life than the one society had prepared for them. Religious life offered liberation from the often-demonized views of black women that existed in dominant society. Though denied the right to wear their religious habits in public for fear of persecution, black religious women persevered in the fight to establish permanent institutions of education, benevolence, and social development. They were, arguably, the first African American business and professional women.

Unfortunately, records of the actions of black Catholic slave women have not been as available as they are for free black women. A task yet to be completed is the exploration of archival records of narratives written by former slaves and of white slave-owning religious institutions and Catholic plantations to find the voices of those women who, though unnamed, were instrumental in passing on the Catholic faith to generations.

The Postbellum World

After the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction with its brief freedom, African Americans found themselves once again trapped in a life of unceasing labor with little personal reward. In the South, they were reduced to a peonage that bound them and their descendants to the land, owned usually by their former owners. Though life in the North and West offered somewhat better employment opportunities, most black women still found themselves restricted to domestic employment which often separated them from their families for days and weeks at a time and exposed them once again to sexual assaults. Educational and religious institutions founded during slavery or Reconstruction were often threatened with dismantlement by those who saw the education of former slaves as a threat. Both groups of sisters refused to cease in their efforts to educate and elevate their people, viewing capitulation as a denial of God's righteous justice. They persevered in maintaining and eventually expanding their ministry across the United States, opening schools, orphanages, and, as the need arose, homes for the aged.

Blacks who migrated from the South to the North, bringing with them a hunger for education and a thirst for justice, only to face rejection from their white Catholic brothers and sisters, soon found it necessary to build their own schools and churches.

All of the women were black but not all of them were religious sisters. Many, such as Ellen Terry and Emma Lewis, were active in establishing settlement houses in the East and Midwest to provide resources for the black migrants, and in developing and teaching catechetical programs to black children. Lewis was a catechist and founder of two mission churches. Constance Daniel became the assistant principal, under her husband, of the Cardinal Gibbons Institute (1924–1967) in southern Maryland, which educated African Americans from across the United States.

A leading laywoman represents both the faith and the belief in action of black Catholic women. Dr. Lena Edwards (1900–1986), a Howard Medical School graduate, established a community practice in obstetrics and gynecology in 1924 in New Jersey, becoming the first board certified African American woman obstetrician and gynecologist. A critical voice in the struggle against racism and sexism, Edwards was awarded the 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.

Other laywomen participated with their husbands and parish priests in founding the Knights and Ladies of Saint Peter Claver and St. John when blacks were denied entry into the Knights of Columbus. These organizations were formed to promote the faith and provide service opportunities for black Catholic men and women.

Black Catholic laywomen, like their religious sisters, were instrumental not just in building and maintaining thriving black Catholic communities but also in spreading the Catholic faith throughout the United States and fostering vocations to the religious life and the priesthood. The Ladies Auxiliary, for example, helped prepare young black women and men for future success and leadership in the worlds of education, business, medicine, law, and the Church itself.

Thus, despite obstacles at every turn, despite the denial of their right to participate in the sacraments of the church on an equal basis, despite being denied recognition for their ongoing presence and contributions to the church in the United States, African American women did not allow anyone to stop them in the practice of their faith nor in its implementation in their communities. Convinced that God was a God of justice in whose image they, too, had been created, they persevered in spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ far and wide and in doing so inspired countless others to follow them.

Post–Civil Rights Movement and Vatican II

The 1960s and 1970s saw rapid transformation and challenge, both in Catholicism and in secular society. Catholics added their voices and bodies to the civil rights movement. Religious men and women, such as Sister Antona Ebo who marched at Selma, Alabama, joined priests and laity of every race and ethnicity to demand justice for African Americans. Many of them participated against the will of their bishop or superior. As the shift from nonviolence to the more radical Black Power and Black Nationalist movements occurred, the Catholic church was emerging from an historic council which opened the Church to the different peoples and cultures from which the faithful came. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) returned the Church to the People of God (the laity) by turning its altars to face the congregation and by celebrating the Eucharist in English and other common languages. Black Catholics, inspired by these changes and those wrought by the civil rights movement, began to reassert their claim to recognition and affirmation for their more than four hundred years of faithfulness in and for the church.

In 1968, the newly formed National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus issued a statement, affirmed by the National Black Sisters Conference (NBSC), critiquing the Church for its ongoing failure to meaningfully address the issues and concerns of the black Catholic community. Naming the Church a “white, racist institution,” they called upon all Catholics to reaffirm and live Jesus's radical love for all of God's creation.

The NBSC, founded by 155 black women from 79 congregations, 45 cities, the Caribbean, and Africa, emerged as a critical voice for black Catholic women. It served as a source of support and stimulation for black sisters and also as a catalyst for programs for the wider black Catholic community.

Black Catholic women were also instrumental in reviving the National Congresses held by black Catholics in the late 1890s. In 1987, during the first Congress of the twentieth century, seven of the twelve keynote speakers were women, including Sisters Francesca Thompson and Thea Bowman. The National Office for Black Catholics, later the Secretariat for African American Catholics, was founded shortly after the NBSC, with Delores Morgan as its head. Women also played critical roles as heads of diocesan offices. By the twenty-first century, a majority of the members of the National Association of Black Catholic Administrators were also women serving as consultants to their bishops on all issues and concerns.

Women like Sister Thea Bowman challenged the Church to live up to the gospel. Born in Mississippi, the first and only black member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Sister Thea was instrumental in helping to recover the African roots and spirituality of Black Catholics. Sister Thea confronted her fellow Catholics, from bishops to the laity, and challenged them to recognize the life-giving presence of persons of African descent. She called upon Catholics to inculcate the Catholic faith into the cultures of all the faithful regardless of race and ethnicity.

Sister Thea and other women of faith, such as Sister Cora Billingsley, the first black woman to be named Pastoral Administrator of a Catholic parish, and Dr. Delores Greer, the first black woman to be named Chancellor of a major archdiocese, in their actions as well as by their faith revealed the strong foundations of the Catholic faith that were established by the many black women who had preceded them. Black women continued to serve the faith as theologians, canon lawyers, directors of religious education, catechists, liturgists, and administrators. Those who followed ensured that the voices of black Catholic women would never again be lost or silenced.

Into the Twenty-first Century

Black Catholic women continued to be the heartbeat of the black Catholic community. Like their foremothers in the church, black Catholic women refused to be bound by convention or limited by the expectations of their fellow believers. They engaged in efforts at every level of the church to open the doors of leadership, not just to women but to men as well, recognizing that God created humanity as both male and female.

In July 2001, after a decade of preparation and planning, the NBSC sponsored the first National Black Catholic Women's Conference, at which over eight hundred women gathered in solidarity to share their faith and discuss issues of common concern. Outgoing NBSC president Patty Chappelle saw the meeting as an opportunity for black women to focus on issues of importance to them. Those issues—solidarity, health, spirituality, spiritual and political empowerment, economic development, and vocations—were the themes of workshops that took place during the conference. In this way, black Catholic women began the rebuilding of black communities torn apart by poverty, drugs, HIV/AIDS, lack of decent education, and the many other ills that plagued African Americans. They recognized and challenged the hold that the sins of racism, sexism, and classism have had on all Americans and worked toward that time when all forms of oppression will be erased and the kingdom of God will be allowed to spread freely. Until that day, however, black Catholic women continue to fight for justice and righteousness in God's name.

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