Black Catholic Women Religious

By: Diane Batts Morrow

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Black Catholic Women Religious

Few people include Roman Catholicism among the religious traditions of African Americans; the existence of black Roman Catholic sisterhoods, or societies of women religious, remains a historical reality unfamiliar to the general public. Nevertheless, between 1828 and 1916 black women in the United States organized several religious communities, three of which remained active even into the twenty-first century. During historical periods particularly hostile to black people in U.S. society—the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, for example, when slavery and legally sanctioned racial discrimination prevailed—devout Catholic women cofounded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1828; the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1842; and the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary in Savannah, Georgia, in 1916.

These courageous black women pursued religious vocations within a society that too often denied the virtue of all black women. From the early days of slavery, many whites considered black women the opposite of women of virtue, the idealized image of white middle-class women. Resisting white society's negative characterizations, these black women instead defined themselves primarily in terms of their disciplined exercise of piety and virtue and service to members of their race. These black sisters made spirituality their hallmark and defined blackness as compatible with virtue, in defiance of white cultural beliefs.

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the American Catholic Church proved as racist and sexist as secular society. Clergymen who had owned slaves and defended slavery later enforced segregation in their dioceses. Priest directors and bishops vigorously enforced their hierarchical, patriarchal authority over the sisterhoods. Nevertheless, religious communal life offered both black and white Catholic women relative independence from constant male supervision, and opportunities—as staff and directors of schools, orphanages, hospitals, and nursing homes—to enjoy administrative authority. Like their white peers, black women religious endured the sexism practiced in the Catholic Church; unlike their white counterparts, black sisters confronted the racism that pervaded the church.

The Oblate Sisters of Providence (OSP)

Beginning in the 1790s, refugees fleeing revolutions in France and the Caribbean met in Baltimore, setting the stage for the founding, some forty years later, of the Oblate Sisters. French Sulpician priests arrived in Baltimore in 1791 to educate young men for the priesthood. In 1793, black and white refugees began their flight from the slave revolution in the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) to several port cities in the United States. In Baltimore, Sulpician priests organized Sunday religious instruction for the black refugees who met in their seminary chapel in 1796.

Mathilda Beasley, a free woman of color who became a Franciscan nun in the 1880s and attempted to found a convent in Savannah, Georgia.

Austin/Thompson Collection

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Born of racially mixed parentage in either Saint Domingue or Cuba, Elizabeth Clarisse Lange (c. 1784–1882), cofounder of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, was one of these Caribbean refugees fleeing to Baltimore, where she settled by 1813. She and her companion, Marie Balas, opened a school for children of color in their home. When, in 1827, the Sulpician priest and Oblate cofounder James Joubert (1777–1843) inherited the responsibility for Sunday religious training for black children, he asked Lange and Balas to staff the new school. During their first meeting, Lange and Balas informed Joubert of their ten-year desire to become sisters. After consulting with Archbishop James Whitfield of Baltimore, Joubert agreed to establish a black sisterhood and to serve as its first spiritual director. In 1828, the Oblate candidates Lange, Balas, Rosine Boegue, and Therese Duchemin began their novitiate, or spiritual training for religious life. On 13 June 1828, the sisters opened the School for Colored Girls. On 2 July 1829, the four charter Oblate Sisters of Providence professed their vows. By 1831, the community numbered twelve members.

Lange served as Oblate superior from 1828 to 1832 and then from 1835 to 1841. She also served as novice mistress from 1850 until 1855, assistant superior from 1857, and in 1858 director of an Oblate satellite school. Her personal qualities, example, and leadership strengthened the sisterhood through the many hardships of its first half-century.

Oblate records document the explicit racial consciousness of the sisterhood. In 1829, the sisters defined themselves in their Rule and Constitutions as “a Religious society of Coloured Women, established…with the approbation of the Most Reverend Archbishop [who] renounce the world to consecrate themselves to God, and to the Christian education of young girls of color.” In correspondence recorded in the Oblate Annals in 1835, Mother Superior Lange astutely acknowledged “the difficulty of our situation [a]s persons of color and religious at the same time,” while simultaneously insisting on “the respect, which is due to the state we have embraced and the holy habit which we have the honor to wear.”

Antebellum Oblate racial consciousness, however, avoided distinctions based on color and elitism. Oblate candidates derived from neither the tiny wealthy elite nor the more numerous professional classes, but typically from families of barbers, caterers, or confectioners. Several Oblate candidates worked in domestic service to earn the $400 dowry members brought to the community upon admission. The community accepted both light- and dark-skinned women, candidates who spoke either French or English, and those born either free or into slavery.

The Oblate teaching ministry addressed a real need for the black community in and around Baltimore. Public education for black pupils in the South did not exist before the Civil War. Although Maryland had not explicitly legislated against educating either free or slave black people, public attitudes toward black education remained indifferent or hostile. By 1860, the Oblate Sisters operated four schools in the city and taught both male and female pupils. Black people responded enthusiastically to Oblate educational efforts with significant financial contributions, patronage of the Oblate schools, and donations of time, skills, and resources to support the sisterhood. White Catholic benefactors also donated money to the Oblate community, but in amounts significantly lower than their donations to white sisterhoods.

Religious life provided no haven from hard work. Because bishops expected sisterhoods in their dioceses to be self-supporting, the Oblate community depended on tuition, dowries, income from sewing clerical vestments and altar linens, and donations from benefactors. The depressed economic conditions most black people experienced during the nineteenth century prevented them from making either substantial donations to the Oblate community or substantial dowry endowments. Indeed, the Oblate Sisters frequently waived the dowry requirement for particularly promising but poor candidates. Teaching and sewing proved the most reliable sources of Oblate income.

When Father Joubert died in 1843, these women of faith experienced a crisis. Baltimore church authorities, indifferent to the survival of this black sisterhood, failed to appoint another priest as Oblate spiritual director and predicted the failure of the community. From November 1843 until October 1847, the Oblate Sisters maintained their spiritual lives and conducted their school without benefit of priestly direction. During this period of clerical abandonment, the light-skinned charter Oblate Sister Therese Duchemin left the community to cofound a white congregation—Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary—in Monroe, Michigan, in 1845.

The Oblate Sisters' religious commitment finally attracted the support of the German Redemptorist priests who, beginning with Father Thaddeus Anwander, assumed their spiritual direction from 1847 to 1860. The sisters enjoyed long, productive, and particularly cordial relationships with several of their priest directors throughout the nineteenth century: the Sulpician James Joubert (1828–1843), the Redemptorist Thaddeus Anwander (1847–1855), the Jesuit Peter Miller (1860–1877), and the Josephite Alfred Leeson (1882–1910).

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Oblate community branched out from Baltimore and established missions and staffed parochial schools in several states and the District of Columbia. They maintained missions in Cuba from 1900 until the Castro regime expelled them in the 1960s. They operated St. Frances Orphanage in Baltimore from 1866 to 1926 and established orphanages and schools in Missouri and Kansas. The original Oblate School for Colored Girls, later St. Frances Academy, expanded its quality education in 1923 to include a secondary curriculum and graduated its first high school class.

The Oblate Sisters of Providence continued at the end of the twentieth century to respond to the changing needs of the black community. St. Frances Academy, a high school that enrolled both male and female students, not only challenged its inner-city students academically but also served their emotional and spiritual needs. In 1978, the sisters organized Saint Frances Outreach to serve the youth of the Brentwood Village area of Baltimore. Beginning in 1998, the sisters operated the Mary Elizabeth Lange Center to provide residential care for abandoned, neglected, and abused girls. Approximately ninety-four Oblate Sisters conducted ministries in six states, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. The sisters established the Mother Mary Lange Guild to promote the canonization of their cofounder Lange—that is, her recognition as a saint in the Catholic Church. In 2003–2004 the Oblate Sisters of Providence celebrated their 175th anniversary.

The Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF)

In 1842, two pious and determined young women of color in New Orleans attained a significant goal in their long and arduous path toward formal recognition as a Roman Catholic sisterhood. Henriette de Lille (1812–1862) and Juliette Gaudin (1808–1888) made private vows as sisters before Father Etienne Rousselon on 21 November 1842. In 1843, Josephine Charles (1812–1885) joined the fledgling community. The Sisters of the Holy Family consider all three charter members as cofounders of their institute, with Father Rousselon as their first spiritual director. Henriette de Lille manifested religious piety and evangelical fervor early in her youth. Because Louisiana law prohibited interracial marriages, de Lille's white father and mulatto mother maintained placage, or an illegitimate conjugal union, a practice prevalent in New Orleans. De Lille's older sister continued this family tradition, but Henriette rejected this option and dedicated herself to religion. Under the influence of two French immigrants—Sister Ste. Marthe, who ran a school for children of color; and Marie Jean Aliquot, who devoted her life to evangelizing people of color—de Lille eventually recognized her religious vocation. She and her friend Juliette Gaudin catechized slaves and performed works of mercy among the black residents of the city. They promoted church-validated marriages for slave couples and also encouraged free young quadroon women to shun placage in favor of legitimate marriages to men of their class. Veterans of two failed efforts to form integrated sisterhoods, de Lille and Gaudin at last succeeded in 1842 in forming the nucleus of the colored Sisters of the Holy Family.

Although the sisters originally intended to establish a school for girls of color, Father Rousselon encouraged them instead to care for the black indigent elderly. The sisterhood was incorporated in 1847, forming the Association of the Holy Family, which free people of color supported morally, legally, and financially. The association made possible the construction of a suitable home for the black poor, which the sisters opened in 1849 as the Hospice of the Holy Family. In 1850, they started a school for free girls of color of means. They also nursed the black poor in their homes and founded an orphanage, the Asylum of the Children of the Holy Family. The community experienced no net growth in its first decade, because aspiring candidates found their work too demanding to persevere in their vocations. Not until Suzanne Navarre entered the community in July 1852 did another candidate remain. De Lille and Gaudin publicly pronounced their official vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience before Father Rousselon on 15 October 1852. They replaced their simple blue habit (dress) with a black one at this time.

The experience of the Oblate Sisters in Baltimore, in which Archbishop Whitfield quickly sanctioned their formation, their habit, their Rule and Constitutions, and their professing official vows between 1829 and 1832, stood in stark contrast to the protracted experience of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans. Not until 1866, after the Civil War, did Father Rousselon propose a formal habit for the sisters, an effort aborted by his death later that year. In the 1870s, Mother Superior Josephine Charles designed a habit, which Archbishop Napoleon Perché angrily rejected as pretentious and inappropriate for a colored sisterhood. Only the intervention of the spiritual director Father Gilbert Raymond persuaded the archbishop to approve a habit for the sisters in 1881.

Similarly, the bishops of New Orleans only incrementally approved the Rule and Constitutions of the Sisters of the Holy Family. In 1842, Father Rousselon drafted a code of rules and a daily regimen for the sisters to follow under de Lille's supervision, which Archbishop Antoine Blanc informally sanctioned. In 1876, Father Raymond presented a Provisional Rule for Archbishop Perché's approval. Not until 1887 did Archbishop Francis Leray formally approve a complete Rule and Constitutions for the institute. The dilatory, decades-long course to full recognition and formal approval as a Roman Catholic sisterhood that the diocesan authorities set for the indomitable Sisters of the Holy Family neither dimmed their religious fervor nor deflected their steadfastness. The sisters transformed intended racial humiliation into spiritual benefit.

The nineteenth-century racial consciousness of the Holy Family Sisters reflected their social origins in the privileged middle of a color caste system. The antebellum sisterhood restricted membership to elite, fair-skinned, and freeborn candidates. Some members or their families had owned slaves. In 1867, the application of Chloe Preval, a dark-skinned former slave, precipitated a split in the community and the establishment of a second house under Sister Josephine Charles's direction. This house received Preval as a candidate in 1869. As Sister M. Francis Borgia Hart, SSF, observed in “A History of the Congregation,” “With the reception of Chloe the barriers were broken. The question of color and slavery being relegated to the past, the only requirements for admission being a virtuous life and the signs of a true vocation to the service of the poor.”

The sisters' service to the poor assumed many forms. In 1876 they directed the Louisiana Asylum for Negro Girls; organized Lafon, the first black male orphanage in New Orleans in 1896; and reorganized Lafon into a Home for the Aged in 1920. Their education ministry grew in 1882 with St. Mary's Academy, the first Catholic secondary school for girls in New Orleans; and with the opening of schools in Texas, California, Oklahoma, and Belize, Central America.

In the late twentieth century, the sisters began to seek the canonization of their foundress, Henriette de Lille. As the century turned, some 175 Sisters of the Holy Family served the elderly, the poor, and youth through ministries of evangelization, education, housing, and health care. They celebrated their 160th anniversary in 2002.

The Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary (FHM)

The Georgia State Legislature's 1915 proposal to prohibit white teachers from instructing black children precipitated the establishment of the Handmaids of Mary in 1916. Its cofounder Father Ignatius Lissner of the Society of African Missions asked both the Oblate Sisters and the Sisters of the Holy Family to supply teachers for the three black schools in Georgia, which white sisters eventually staffed because personnel constraints prevented both black sisterhoods from accepting this assignment. Lissner obtained the permission of Bishop Benjamin Keiley to organize a black sisterhood in Savannah. A friend directed Lissner to Elizabeth Barbara Williams, a devout Catholic woman working in Washington, DC, who became a cofounder of the Handmaids of Mary.

Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Elizabeth Barbara Williams (1868–1931) received her education from the white Religious of the Sacred Heart and the black Sisters of the Holy Family. She had previously pursued her religious vocation in a black contemplative Franciscan sisterhood in Convent, Louisiana, disbanded early in the twentieth century, and later as a novice in the Oblate sisterhood. Responding to her daily prayer, “Lord, what would you have me do?” Williams assumed the major responsibility for forming and leading the new community, pronouncing her vows in 1916 as Mother Mary Theodore.

While the Handmaids of Mary materialized, the restrictive state legislation did deprive the small sisterhood of its intended ministry in Georgia. In New York the black migration from the rural South to the urban North early in the twentieth century had produced a burgeoning black population in Harlem. Williams decided to accept the invitation of Cardinal Patrick Hayes of New York to the Handmaids to serve this impoverished community. The sisters relocated to Harlem in 1922 and opened St. Benedict's Nursery in 1923. Pioneers in the field of early childhood education, the sisters developed nursery care that evolved from a custodial to an educational program. The Handmaids staffed St. Benedict the Moor Parochial School in midtown Manhattan from 1926 to 1936, at which time the black population shift to Harlem made their midtown presence unnecessary. The Handmaids also operated a soup kitchen out of their convent. The celebrated photographer James VanDerZee's 1920s portraits of the Handmaids' ministry at St. Benedict Nursery and St. Mary's Convent were an eloquent statement on the sisters' status as a Harlem institution.

In 1929, Williams, reaffirming her original Franciscan spirituality, affiliated the sisterhood—renamed the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary—with the Franciscan Third Order, under the spiritual direction of Franciscan priests. She also established their novitiate on Staten Island that year. When Williams died in 1931, the congregation numbered twenty members.

Sister Mary Charles Wilson (1878–1938), Williams's successor as superior-general, made education her focus. To accommodate the graduates of St. Benedict's Nursery, in 1935 the Handmaids opened in their convent St. Mary's Primary School, which later expanded into St. Aloysius Parochial School, dedicated in 1941. In 1952, the Handmaids purchased Camp Pratt on Staten Island and renamed it Camp St. Edward; it was the only Catholic overnight summer camp to provide inner-city children with a country experience. The sisters extended their ministry to North and South Carolina in the 1950s and to Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1970s. Their ministry included high school teaching, parish visitations, care of the elderly, and, in 1986, the Barbara Williams Outreach to feed the Harlem homeless.

By the 1990s, however, declining membership forced the Handmaids to relinquish their missions in the Carolinas and Jamaica. By the year 2000, just twenty-two members continued to serve the parents and children of St. Benedict's Nursery; administered Camp St. Edward; staffed parochial schools in Harlem; catechized; and served the elderly, homeless, and the sick in their homes, hospitals, or institutions. In 2001, the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary celebrated their eighty-fifth anniversary.

Legacy

In spite of their historical and regional differences, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of the Holy Family, and the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary confronted the same daunting challenges in the latter half of the twentieth century. The civil rights movement from the mid-1950s swept American society up in its maelstrom of escalating demands, challenges to power relationships, introspection about and redefinitions of racial identities and consciousness. The feminist movement fundamentally questioned conventional gender definitions, relationships, and hegemonies. Reforms within the Roman Catholic Church instigated by Pope John XXIII's convening of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) required all sisterhoods to reevaluate and redefine their self-perceptions, Rules and Constitutions, religious dress, and community life. The three black Catholic sisterhoods responded to the onslaughts of these social and cultural forces in similar ways.

Like white sisterhoods, the black religious communities experienced a significant decline in membership. Some sisters could not accept the new realities of religious life envisioned by Vatican II, and they left their communities. Furthermore, the women's movement made accessible to women vocational opportunities previously reserved exclusively for men, not only depleting the pool of prospective new candidates for the sisterhoods but also attracting some professed religious to the secular life. After Vatican II, the sisterhoods no longer practiced racial segregation; they now offered membership to candidates regardless of race. While numerous white congregations accepted black members, the historically black sisterhoods did not experience a correspondingly significant infusion of white members.

In 1968 black women religious formed the National Black Sisters' Conference, a venue in which black sisters from historically black and white sisterhoods participated. Shawn Copeland observed in her essay “A Cadre of Women Religious Committed to Black Liberation” that by making visible and by uniting “black vowed women religious…the NBSC promoted and advocated an ‘image’ of the black Catholic sister and her mission in terms of liberation.” Attendance at the first meeting numbered 155 sisters from 79 different congregations.

All three historically black sisterhoods established “lay associate” programs that included male and female, as well as lay and clerical members, as collaborators in their prayer life and ministries. All three also reached out to the African diaspora, incorporating members from affiliating associates or establishing missions in either African or Caribbean nations. All three developed flexible, dynamic values and mission statements, which reflected their resolve to be responsive to contemporary needs and affirmed their commitment to poor and disenfranchised constituencies, but reaffirmed their special historical ministries to peoples of African descent. Black Catholic women religious continued to make important contributions to black people in particular and American society in general.

See also Black Catholic Women.

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