Celebrating Juneteenth: Learn from Black Catholics on the Road to Sainthood

Celebrating Juneteenth as Catholics it is difficult to imagine any better way than to reflect on the lives of the six American Black Catholics, four women and two men, who are somewhere on the road to official sainthood. Three of them were born into slavery, and all of them had some association with its history, so to remember them on the occasion of the federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery is really a no-brainer. The litany could go something like this:

Servant of God, Mother Mary Lange, pray for us,
Venerable Henriette DeLille, pray for us,
Venerable Augustus Tolton, pray for us,
Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, pray for us,
Venerable Pierre Toussaint, pray for us,
Servant of God, Julia Greeley, pray for us.

It surely is important for a still preponderantly white American Catholic Church to pay attention to these notable Black Catholics, and to ask them to pray for us, not so much because they are Black as because they are Catholics. Their importance lies in the ways in which their individual lives speak to our church today. None of them had an easy life. All of them were heroic. Each in turn has a lot to teach us about how to conduct ourselves today as what Pope Francis calls us, “missionary disciples.” They are not “them.” They are “us.”

My own favorite is the humblest of them all, Julia Greeley, who was a freed slave who converted to Catholicism. She lived mostly in and around Denver, working for white families and using her own limited resources to aid those poorer than herself, towing around a wagon filled with food, clothing and even firewood, and doing it at night-time to save embarrassing the recipients of her help. Her life and work have deep ecclesial significance, mostly because they strongly suggest that holiness has no essential connection to the spectacular. Like St. Alphonsus Rodriguez before her, the Jesuit who spent his entire working life as a doorkeeper, Julia Greeley testifies to the spiritual importance of the everyday.

Each of the remaining five in their different ways alert us to the close connection between heroic sanctity and the ordinary and, because they were Black, the extraordinary hurdles that each of them had to negotiate. Augustus Tolton, a former slave, became the first Black American Catholic priest. When one of his teachers recognized the young man’s possible priestly calling, however, no American seminary would admit him. Instead, he studied in Rome, returning to work in the Midwest for a few short years before his early death in 1897, where he was such a fine preacher that his small Black congregation’s numbers were soon swelled by white Catholics looking for a good homily. You can only guess how the local clergy reacted to that!

And then there was Henriette DeLille, great granddaughter of a slave, who could not gain admission to a religious community, so she used her family’s funds to establish the Sisters of the Presentation in 1842 and was their Mother Superior until her death 20 years later. Their most important work for our church today was surely that they taught slaves—a forbidden and hence dangerous commitment. And how about Pierre Toussaint, a slave from Haiti who bought his freedom in New York through years of work as a hairdresser and is the only layperson buried in the crypt of St. Patrick’s Cathedral? He was a huge philanthropist, considered by many to be effectively the founder of Catholic charities, builder of New York’s first orphanage and the first school for Black children. Or Mother Mary Lange, who 30 years before the proclamation of emancipation, founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore and a school for Black children. Her order, then and now, has a special concern for the marginalized members of society.

Last but not least, there is the only one of the six whose life was lived out in the modern world, Sister Thea Bowman, whose name is attached to residence halls at both Sacred Heart University and Fairfield University. A childhood convert to Catholicism, she went on to become an extraordinary force in American Catholic life as a teacher, scholar, writer, public speaker and outspoken critic of racism in society and the Church. She would laugh, I am sure, to be told that she is best known for a YouTube video in which her personal magnetism is demonstrated when, wheelchair-bound and dying of cancer, she got the entire U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to stand and sing We Shall Overcome!

Brave, humble, countercultural, outspoken, deeply wounded and entirely faithful to the Catholic Church, these women and men point a way forward for the American church. Each in their own way is a model of countercultural fortitude, and each is accessible to all of today’s American Catholics, Black and white, of whatever political persuasion. You set your sights on God, you look around you at your fallen world, you roll up your sleeves and you just do what has to be done. In our age, marked by hatreds of all sorts, they remind us of the power of simple human goodness. Their holiness shames every instance of white privilege. And most, if not all, of our American Catholic community have never heard of them. Shame on us!

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Paul Lakeland is emeritus professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield University.

Comments

[Dr. Brian Stiltner]

Thank you for this wonderful reflection and call to action, Professor Lakeland. Let's all do our part to spread more awareness of these saintly people and to live by their examples.