Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860
Journal article by Robert Emmett Curran; Journal of Southern History, Vol. 69, 2003
Journal Article Excerpt
Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860. by Robert Emmett Curran By Diane Batts Morrow. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2002. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5401-8; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2726-6.) This is a welcome history of the origins and early years of the first community of black women religious of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. A collaborative effort by emigres from revolutions throughout the French empire during the 1790s--biracial women from San Domingue and priests of the Society of St. Sulpice from France--the Oblate Sisters of Providence began in Baltimore with four members, all San Dominguans, who were sponsored by Sulpicians looking for women to conduct a school for children of color. Despite opposition from both clergy and laity in Baltimore, the Oblate Sisters received ambivalent approval from the institutional church and began their school in 1828. The school quickly proved popular and became the spiritual center for Baltimore's black Catholics (and even some Protestants). By the end of the 1830s the number of active members had grown; among them were both freeborn and ex-slaves. Many were former students. There were occasional white students, as well as students from other black communities beyond the city. But, as Morrow shows, the Oblates' tenuous foundation reflected their precarious existence within the institutional church. Despite flourishing as a community during their first fifteen years, they were barely tolerated by archdiocesan authorities, particularly after Samuel Eccleston became archbishop in 1834. At the same time, conditions in Maryland for blacks, free and slave, were deteriorating steadily due to repressive legislation and immigrant competition. Morrow shows how church authorities acted to suppress the order after the Oblates' cofounder and spiritual director, James Joubert, died in 1843. The Sulpicians effectively abandoned them, falling to provide a replacement for Joubert, and the archbishop forbade them from receiving any new candidates. Amid this crisis, the community suffered a serious internal rupture when one of the charter members, Sr. Marie Therese Duchemin, left for Michigan to start another religious community (a white one, since Duchemin was light enough to pass). With enrollment at fewer than twenty by 1845 and their chapel closed, the Oblates seemed, as a Sulpician put it, "beyond preservation" (p. 202). But rescue providentially materialized in late 1847, when the Oblates encountered a Redemptorist priest, Thaddeus Anwander, at St. James Church, where they were forced to go for religious services. Anwander virtually forced Eccleston to appoint him as their director. With Anwander's enthusiastic involvement, as well as the support of a new archbishop, the community revived sharply during the 1850s. When the Oblates had formed in 1828, the population of black Catholics in Baltimore was estimated at fewer than four hundred. This number probably quadrupled by 1860 (Anwander himself baptized more than three hundred converts during the 1850s), a remarkable growth for which the Oblate Sisters, through their school and chapel, were largely responsible. Morrow sees "[b]lack female agency" as the "hallmark of the antebellum Oblate experience" (p. 274). However, her efforts to highlight the Sisters' self-empowerment, despite the paucity of sources, lead Morrow at times to speculation and unsubstantiated assertions. She celebrates, for instance, the Oblates' determination to preserve their community in the face of adversity during the 1840s, but the individual sisters become virtually indiscernible after the 1830s. It is difficult to recognize agency when the players lose visibility; for example, Made Louise Noel, superior from 1844-1851 and again from 1861-1885, presumably played a key role in the Order's preservation, but we learn virtually nothing of her administration or what she thought or did during this crucial period. Similarly, Morrow reads Afro-Caribbean cultural patterns into the Oblates' early history on the strength of little or no evidence. Nevertheless, Morrow's contextually sensitive recovery of the emergence of this distinctive black Catholic institution is a valuable contribution to antebellum religious history. ROBERT EMMETT CURRAN Georgetown University -1- |
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