Catholic Church and African Americans

By: Thomas E. Carney

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Catholic Church and African Americans

The Roman Catholic Church has a long history regarding the institution of slavery and blacks. The church was founded during the decline of ancient Roman society, in which slavery was endemic and tolerated. Indeed, the church found the practice, at least with respect to black Africans, acceptable well into the nineteenth century. This was so despite the fact that the Catholic Church had an institutional presence in sub-Saharan Africa as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. The European church's understanding of the nature of slavery, however, differed considerably from the practice as it developed in the British North American colonies and the early United States of America. Pursuant to the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, slavery had to operate within the confines of natural law, which limited a master's ownership rights to the slave's labor, not to the slave, and further required that the owner treat his slaves humanely. Consistent with this position and in recognition of its obligations to the slaves, the church carried on an active missionary effort among the African slaves and slave communities. This work was pursued in the seventeenth century by such notable figures as Saints Vincent de Paul and Peter Carver, whose recognition by the church was the result of their dedicated service to African slaves.

Although members of the Roman Catholic Church came to what would later become the United States very early in the exploration of North America, even by the colonial and Revolutionary periods of American history Catholics were numerically few, and their presence was limited mainly to Maryland and Louisiana. In 1783 over 65 percent of the Catholic population resided in Maryland, and as late as 1830 Catholics represented only 5 percent of the total population of the United States. The formal institutional presence of the Catholic Church in the United States began in 1789 with the establishment of the Diocese of Baltimore, followed by the Diocese of New Orleans in 1793. The number of Catholic dioceses increased to six in 1829 and to ten by 1834.

The official position of the U.S. Catholic Church regarding slavery was largely consistent with the position of the church in Europe. It opposed abolitionism and viewed slavery as a means to provide for the religious salvation of the blacks. Not surprisingly, the church, through its emissaries, engaged in the practice of slavery very early on. The Ursulines, a French order of nuns, who were the first order to establish themselves in New Orleans, in 1727, were given and accepted eight slaves. These black slaves served as domestics and worked on the small plantation that the order owned. In compliance with the church's teachings, the nuns carefully provided the slaves (and Native Americans) with religious training.

The earliest and best documentation of the Catholic Church's involvement in slavery in the United States focuses on the Jesuits in Maryland. The ownership of slaves by the Jesuits can be documented from 1717; the number of slaves owned by the Jesuits grew from 192 in 1765 to 272 in 1838. When the Jesuits abandoned the practice of owning slaves in 1838, they held more than eleven thousand acres of land that were worked by slaves. Many (if not most) of the slaves came to the Jesuits as gifts from the Catholic laity. Some historians have argued that the Jesuits originally had hoped to utilize white indentured servants to work their plantations, thereby providing a means to support and enlarge the Catholic population in Maryland. However, the decline of indentured servants in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries prompted the Jesuits increasingly to use black slaves.

The Ursulines and the Jesuits were not the only slaveholders in the early American Catholic Church. The several orders of priests that owned slaves included the Vincentians in Missouri, the Sulpicians in Baltimore, and the Capuchins in Louisiana. The orders of nuns that owned slaves included the Carmelites in Maryland and the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky. Slaves often came to the communities of nuns as part of the dowry that each new candidate brought to her convent.

The early American church, through its leadership, was committed to a “Christian” form of slavery. Archbishop John Carroll, the first bishop of the Diocese of Baltimore, criticized Catholic slaveholders who failed to provide for their slaves' faith and morals. This condemnation was repeated by his successor, James Whitfield. In 1791 Archbishop Carroll arranged for the Sulpicians, a French order of priests, to come to Baltimore. By 1796 the Sulpicians were providing religious instruction to free blacks at Saint Mary's Seminary in Baltimore. After 1809 they were assisted by the newly formed Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. Other American bishops also fostered this work among the black Catholics. Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, established a school for free black children that was run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. In 1829, however, local prejudice and violence forced Bishop England to close the school.

The most significant event in the history of blacks in the Catholic Church in the early United States occurred in Baltimore. In the years following the revolution led by Toussaint Louverture that began in 1791 on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), significant numbers of blacks and mulattoes fled to the United States. Many of these exiles came to Baltimore. One of them, Mary Elizabeth Lange, was a French-speaking Creole and the granddaughter of a wealthy plantation owner. She was born to Haitian parents in Cuba, came to the United States in 1817, and soon settled in Baltimore. In 1818 Lange and Marie Madeline Balas, another Haitian refugee, established a school for the free black girls of Baltimore. The two women were later joined by another Haitian refugee, Rosine Boegue, and by 1828 they had purchased a house and had eleven boarding students and nine day students. The ultimate goal of the women, however, was to establish an order of black sisters.

The women, along with other black Catholics in Baltimore, attended segregated religious services in the basement chapel of Saint Mary's Seminary on Paca Street. Most Catholic churches in both the North and the South were segregated in the early nineteenth century, although in the District of Columbia they were integrated, because of the large free black Catholic population. In their basement chapel the women first met the Sulpician priest Father Jacques Hector Nicholas Joubert de la Muraille, who had been born in France and later served as a government official in Haiti. After fleeing Haiti, he entered Saint Mary's Seminary in 1805 and was ordained in 1810. Father Joubert was searching for someone to teach catechism to the young black children of Baltimore. The goals of the priest and the women overlapped. With the intercession of the French priest, Bishop James Whitfield of Baltimore encouraged the women, who in 1829 formally began to establish their order of sisters. In 1831 Pope Gregory XVI officially recognized Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange's Oblate Sisters of Providence, who became the first black order of nuns established in the Catholic Church. The order continues in existence, providing education to poor black children in Baltimore and elsewhere.

The first black men ordained as priests in the U.S. Catholic Church were the brothers James Augustine Healy (1854), Alexander Sherwood Healy (1858), and Patrick Francis Healy (1864). All rose to prominence in the church. James was appointed bishop of Portland, Maine, in 1875; Patrick was president of Georgetown University from 1874 to 1882; and Alexander served as the personal theologian to Bishop John Williams of Boston at the First Vatican Council in 1867.

The establishment of the black Oblate Sisters of Providence and the ordination of the Healy brothers were the results of a marked change in church policy and theology that occurred in the late 1830s. The Jesuit decision to end its involvement with slavery was followed by the Roman Catholic Church's first clear rejection of the practice. In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI issued his apostolic letter In Supremo Apostolatus Fatigo, in which he condemned the practice of slavery: “[We] do … admonish and adjure in the Lord all believers in Christ, of whatsoever condition, that no one hereafter may dare to molest Indians, Negroes, or other men of this sort; or to spoil them of their goods; or to reduce them to slavery.” Despite this clear condemnation of slavery by the Supreme Pontiff, the U.S. Catholic Church, at least in the South, firmly held to the practice. Bishop England of Charleston argued that the condemnation was not aimed at Americans but at the Portuguese and Spanish. In the end, some U.S. Catholics joined with some of their Protestant neighbors to support slavery in America until the Thirteenth Amendment ended the practice in 1865.

There is evidence that a vibrant black Catholic laity existed before the Civil War. In 1843 the Holy Family Society of Colored People was established in Baltimore. The Society, whose members included both black laymen and women and probably slaves, numbered approximately 270. The meeting agenda consisted of an opening prayer, a sermon by the group's spiritual advisor, Father John F. Hickey, and hymns (which reflected the group's African roots). The dues paid by the members, 6 1/4 cents a month, provided for the rent for the meeting hall and for masses to be said for deceased members. The group also established a lending library. In September 1845 Calvert Hall, the parish hall that was attached to the cathedral and was the meeting place for the Society, was given over to the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, thereby displacing the Society. The abruptness of this action caused resentment on behalf of the members, and the Society was dissolved soon after.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, as black and white Protestant ministers and missionaries poured into the South to aid and proselytize the newly emancipated slaves, the American Catholic Church hesitated and then stopped to ponder its relationship to blacks. A few Catholic bishops, Archbishop Martin J. Spalding of Baltimore, Bishop Augustin Verot of St. Augustine, and Bishop William Gross of Savannah, did endeavor to advance an apostolate for blacks. Archbishop Spalding attempted to make the church's position on the new freedmen the primary issue of the Plenary Council of 1866. Despite the efforts of these bishops to establish “an ecclesiastical man” who would take charge of addressing the interests of blacks in the United States, most bishops objected to the proposal, and it was rejected. Instead the bishops choose simply to permit each bishop to address the concerns of blacks in his respective diocese.

Regardless of the American Catholic bishops' unofficial policy of neglect, a strong black Catholic laity continued to grow. In the summer of 1888 Daniel Rudd, a former slave and the publisher of the black Springfield, Ohio, newspaper the American Catholic Tribune, proposed a national meeting of black Catholics. In a letter to Reverend John Slattery, S.S.J., he wrote, “Let the leading Colored Catholics gather together from every city in the Union in some suitable place, where under the blessings of Holy Mother Church they may get to know one another and take up the cause of the race” (Davis, p. 171). On 1–4 January 1889 the first Congress of Colored Catholics convened in Washington, D.C. The meeting was blessed by Pope Leo XIII through his Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla. The participants were addressed by Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and Archbishop William Henry Elder of Cincinnati and visited the White House at the invitation of President Grover Cleveland. In their closing statement the group called for more Catholic schools to educate black Catholic young people and condemned the growing problem of segregation.

The Congress met annually from 1889 until 1894. It continued its emphasis upon education and chided Catholic bishops for not being as aggressive as the Protestant denominations in their efforts to support and convert blacks. The group also investigated the racist and segregationist practices of the southern Catholic dioceses. The Congress met in 1894 but would not meet again until 1987. Commenting upon the Congress, one historian observed that “they demonstrated beyond a doubt not only that a black Catholic community existed but that it was active, devoted, articulate, and proud.” (Davis, p. 193)

See also Education; Haitian Revolution; Missionary Movements; Religion; Toussaint Louverture; and Violence against African Americans.

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