Nuns Confront Slavery Role
Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, one of the oldest Roman Catholic girls’ schools in the United States, has long celebrated its founders: a determined band of Catholic nuns who championed free education for the poor in the early 1800s.
The sisters, who established the elite academy in Washington, also ran “a Saturday school, free to any young girl who wished to learn — including slaves, at a time when public schools were almost nonexistent and teaching slaves to read was illegal,” according to an official history posted for several years on the school’s website.
But when a new school historian started digging in the convent’s records a few years ago, she found no evidence that the nuns had taught enslaved children. Instead, she found records that the sisters had owned at least 107 enslaved men, women and children. And they sold dozens of those people to pay debts and to help finance the expansion of their school and the construction of a new chapel.
“Nothing else to do than to dispose of the family of Negroes,” Mother Agnes Brent, the convent’s superior, wrote in 1821 as she approved the sale of a couple and their two children. The woman was just days away from giving birth to her third child.
I have been poring over church records for several years now and such casual cruelty from leaders of the faith still takes my breath away. I am a black journalist and a Catholic. Yet I grew up knowing nothing about the nuns who bought and sold human beings.
My reporting on Georgetown University in Washington, which profited from the sale of more than 200 slaves, has helped to draw attention to universities’ ties to slavery. But slavery also helped to fuel the growth
of many contemporary institutions, including some churches and religious organizations. Historians say that nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established in the United States by the late 1820s owned slaves.
Today, many Catholic nuns are outspoken champions of social justice, some developing frameworks that may serve as road maps for other institutions striving to atone for participation in America’s system of human bondage.
The Georgetown Visitation sisters and school officials have organized discussions for students, staff and alumnae, including a prayer service in April that commemorated the enslaved people “whose involuntary sacrifices supported the growth of this school.” They have published an online report about the convent’s slaveholding — an article by the school’s historian also appeared in The U.S. Catholic Historian this spring — and have digitized their records related to slavery, making them available to the public.
The Religious of the Sacred Heart, who owned about 150 slaves in Louisiana and Missouri, tracked down dozens of descendants of those people and invited them to a memorial ceremony in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. At the ceremony last fall, the nuns unveiled a monument to the slaves in the local parish cemetery and a plaque on old slave quarters. They also announced a scholarship fund for African-American students at their Catholic school, which was built, in part, by enslaved laborers.
“It wasn’t just a question of looking at the past,” Sister Carolyn Osiek, the provincial archivist for the Society of the Sacred Heart United States/Canada, said. “It was: ‘What do we do with this now?’ ”(The Religious of the Sacred Heart are members of the Society of the Sacred Heart.)
Sister Osiek described the message delivered to the descendants by the order’s provincial leader: “For so long we haven’t acknowledged you, and we’re sorry about that.”
Some descendants declined to participate, finding it too painful. And some nuns have expressed unease about the decision to unearth the past.
“A lot of communities now are very committed to dealing with issues of racism, but the fact is their own history is problematic,” said Margaret Susan Thompson, a historian who has examined Catholic nuns and race in the United States. “They’re beginning to confront their own racism, and their own complicity in the racism of the past, but it’s a very long road.”
Sister Irma L. Dillard, an African-American member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, said that some white nuns felt reluctant to revisit this history because they feared “being seen as racist.”
She praised the steps taken by her order but hopes more will be done. She would like its history of slaveholding incorporated into the curriculum of its schools, but few have publicly acknowledged their origins, she said, adding, “We’ve whitewashed our history.”
It is a history that has largely faded from public consciousness, even among the three million black Catholics who account for about 3 percent of Catholics in the United States.
Growing up in New York City, I lived blocks from a convent. Nuns educated my mother, aunts, uncles and sisters. The church we knew tended to Irish and Italian immigrants, their families, and a smattering of black families. We never imagined that its religious orders had ties to slavery.
In the early decades of the American republic, the Catholic Church established a foothold in the South. It was not unusual for priests and nuns to grow up in slaveholding families, and many orders relied on slave labor, historians say. As women entered convents, some brought their human property with them. Some orders’ schools accepted slaves as payment for tuition.
Mary Ewens, the author of “The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America,” found that seven of the eight first orders of Catholic nuns established in the United States owned slaves by the 1820s. In a more recent study, Joseph G. Mannard revealed that the eighth order did as well, at least for a time.
Some nuns expressed distaste for slavery while others described their reluctance to sell the people they owned. The Carmelites of Baltimore, Maryland, cared for some slaves when they grew infirm. The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky remained so connected to their former slaves that scores returned, with their families, to celebrate its centennial in 1912.
But Dr. Mannard and other researchers have found that the nuns’ financial needs — and the appeal of unpaid labor — often trumped any reluctance to traffic in humans.
“In spite of my repugnance for having Negro slaves, we may be obliged to purchase some,” Rose Philippine Duchesne, who established the Society of the Sacred Heart in the United States, wrote in 1822. A year later, the Sacred Heart sisters in Grand Coteau purchased their first person.
In 1830, the Carmelite sisters cited concerns about having to undertake “the disposal of our poor servants” to explain their reluctance to move to Baltimore from their plantation in rural Maryland. But after learning the sale would help pay off their debts and allow them to keep their rural estate, they sold at least 30 people, Dr. Mannard said.
Nearly a decade later, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s in Emmitsburg, Maryland, founded by Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint, followed the counsel of their religious superior who told them they could sell their “yellow boys” at 10 to 12 percent profit “without doing an injustice to anyone.”
The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky, who owned 30 people at Emancipation, were among the first sisters to seek to make amends. They joined with two other orders to host a prayer service in 2000 where they formally apologized for their slaveholding. In 2012, they erected a monument at a cemetery where many of the enslaved people were buried.
Roslyn Chenier, an African-American software consultant in Atlanta, learned that her forebears had been owned by the Religious of the Sacred Heart when she was contacted by Sister Maureen J. Chicoine, who has researched the history of the order and has identified dozens of descendants.
“I was amazed, amazed,” said Ms. Chenier, who attended the ceremony organized by the sisters last September. “It was very emotional.”
Ms. Chenier gave up practicing many years ago, but some of her relatives remain devout. Learning that their ancestors were owned by nuns astonished them, but hasn’t shaken their Catholic faith, she said.
That doesn’t surprise the Reverend Gregory C. Chisholm, a black priest who heads the St. Charles Borromeo, Resurrection and All Saints parish in Harlem. He has had a number of conversations about Catholic slaveholding, which are often painful, he said, but few black people are surprised to hear about racism among the clergy. Older people still remember the days of segregated pews and segregated churches, he said.
“This whole thing reveals the ways in which the religion has failed us in some way,” said Father Chisholm, who says he is encouraged by the church’s recent efforts to acknowledge its past. “It’s hard. It’s difficult. But it’s good. It’s a way for our church to be renewed and that’s what it has to be. It has to be renewed.”