Found in the Archives: Black Sisters’ Stories
WRAC Honors Black History Month
By Sarah Lubelski
Note: This post relies heavily on research and analysis presented in Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (2022). Her exploration of the experience of Black women religious in America has greatly shaped my understanding of the topic, and I am deeply appreciative of her work.
While many women religious organizations have long histories of ministry service to people of color, congregations and monasteries have had disproportionately low numbers of Black women religious among their members. What has caused this? How have Black women desiring to enter religious life responded? And how are women religious today addressing the egregious errors of their past?
At the request of local bishops, European Sisters came to America to perform missionary work. Asked to minister to Native Americans and African slaves, some are known to have owned slaves themselves. The Sisters of Loretto, an American congregation who engaged in slaveholding, allowed Black women to become oblates in the 1820s. These women are thought to be the first Black sisters to join an established group of women religious, but were never granted full membership in the order. They lived under different rules and wore distinct clothing from the other sisters. The group was disbanded after only a few months by the future Bishop.
Discrimination or exclusion of Black women from predominantly white religious orders led to the establishment of Black orders in the nineteenth century. Notable examples include the Oblate Sisters of Providence (founded in 1829 by Mother Elizabeth Lange), the Sisters of the Holy Family (founded in 1837 by Venerable Henriette DeLille), and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (founded in 1891 by St. Katharine Drexel).
The Jim Crow era saw limited advancement in the integration of Black women religious into white orders, despite the ongoing ministry of religious communities to Black and other people of color. The civil rights era and the Second Vatican Council inspired many vowed religious, Black and white, to join demonstrations for voting rights, acting as moral witnesses against segregation and oppression. In the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1968 assassination, Sister Martin dePorres Grey organized the first meeting of the National Black Sisters Conference near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the goal of fostering community and solidarity among Black sisters.
Today, religious organizations of women are re-evaluating their past involvement in discriminatory practices. For instance, the Sisters of Loretto initiated research and reconstruction of their history with slaveholding in the 1990s and continue to address this through the Loretto Roots Enslavement project. Some religious communities have offered formal apologies to black women denied entry into their congregations, and are delving into their archives to confront their role in perpetuating racism.
The Loretto Slave Memorial dedicated in 2000 offers a space for remembrance and prayer at Loretto’s Our Lady of Sorrows Cemetery. The memorial features names uncovered through archival research, and are brought to life in a sculpture by Roberta Hudlow, SL. The memorial’s inscription reads simply, “Pray for us.”
To find out more, read Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (2022) by Shannen Dee Williams, and check out these resources:
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, “A Sisters’ Community Apologizes to One Woman Whose Vocation Was Denied” (2018)
Dawn Araujo-Hawkins, “Reckoning: White Sisters Respond to Their Own Racism, to One Historian’s Call for Justice” (2018)
Avila University Archives, Selma Sisters: Bearing Witness for Change (2007)
David Crary, “Black Catholic Nuns: A Compelling, Long Overlooked History” (2022)
Laura Michele Diener, “O Hail, Mary, Hail: The Long Complicated History of an American Convent” (2016)
Dr. Annie E. Stevens, “Bound for the Promised Land: Loretto Roots and Enslavement” (2023)
