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Henriette Delille (1812-1862)
Henriette Delille was born a free woman of color in New Orleans in 1813. She was a feminist, social worker, and an educator. She and a friend, Cuban born Juliette Gaudin, worked to teach religion to the slaves, encouraged free quadroon women to select men of their own class and encouraged slave couples to have their unions blessed by the church. In 1835, Delille sold all of her property hoping to start a community of Black nuns to teach in a school for free girls of color. After a few failed attempts, the two nuns, along with Josephine Charles, founded the Sisters of the Holy Family religious order at St. Augustine's Church in 1842.
Although their primary work was in the area of education, Delille made it possible for the order to build a home for the sick, aged, and poor Black residents of the city. They took into their home elderly women who needed care and visitation, and it became America's first Catholic home for the elderly of its kind and is recorded in the National Register. The Sisters heroically cared for the sick and the dying during the yellow fever epidemics that struck New Orleans in 1853 and 1897.
In 1988, the canonization process for sainthood began when Pope John Paul II declared Sister Henriette Delille a Servant of God. The steps to sainthood are a servant of God, venerable, blessed, and saint. Two of the phases, servant of God and venerable, are complete. Venerable was decreed by Pope Benedict XVI March 27, 2010. Venerable Henriette Delille is the first United States native-born African American whose cause for canonization has been officially opened by the Catholic Church.
Religious pioneers : building the faith in the Archdiocese of New Orleans by
Marie Tranchepain de St. Augustin (d. 1733): missionary to the colonies / Mary Ethel Booker Siefken -- Father John Mary Delcros (1822-1858): a life of promise cut short / Stafford Poole -- Mother Henriette DeLille (1812-1862): servant of slaves / Virginia Meacham Gould and Charles E. Nolan -- Mother Anna Josephine Shannon(1810-1896): crossing the lines in the Civil War / Mary Blish -- Francis Xavier Seelos (1819-1867): a life of complete dedication / Carl Hoegerl -- Father Charles Boglioli (1814-1882): leper Priest of Charity Hospital / Warren Dicharry -- Mother Mary Caroline Friess (1824-1882): risking in faith / Audrey Herr and Wonda Potts -- Mother Mary Elizabeth Moran (1836-1905): from Grand Coteau to the World / Mary Blish -- Sister Xavieria Kaschke (1833-1913): intrepid pioneer / Sister Ima Dreger -- Father Theobald Butler (1826-1916): americanizing the Jesuits / Thomas Clancy, Donald Hawkins -- Mother Francis De Sales Mithcel (1816-1895): founder of the Carmel of New Orleans / M. Jane Elligen -- Mother Teresa of Jesus Roman (1835-1895): founder of the Carmel of New Orleans / Aletheia Kane -- Mary Austin Carroll (1835-1909): the Irish Channel nun / Mary Hermenia Muldrey -- Sister Mary Dominic O'Brien (1846-1900): Cabra's gift to New Orleans / Dorothy Dawes -- Father Thomas Lorente (1868-1915): missionary Founder in Louisiana / Carl B. Trutter -- Albert Louis Wagner (1846-1924): Pastor and confessor / Thomas H. Clancy, Donald A. Hawkins -- Mother St. Rose Thiberville (1854-1940): a thoroughly American CSJ of Bourg / Jane Aucoin -- Mother Berchmans Quilter (1868-1954): the Marianites' gentle giant / Mary Kay Viellion -- Sister Mary De Ricci Hutchinson (1868-1931): New Orleans Dominicans come of age / Dorothy Dawes -- Mary Agner Piper (1871-1954) and Clara Myers (ca 1881-1916): interwined in dedication / Judy Roxborough -- Mother Marie De St. Paul Bouffard (1909-1955): prophet of racial equality / Nicole Pineau -- Father Odilo Alt (1891-1969): missionary of St. Tammany Parish / Louis J. Lavedan, Jr. -- Sister Mary Frances Buttell (1884-1977): visionary for Xavier University / Patricia Marshall -- Sister Marie Melicère Perret (1888-1982): a hidden life of prayer / Rita Marie Hickey -- Brother Martin Hernandez (1904-1991): foresighted educator / Geoffrey Kerwin and Alan Drain -- Sister Henrietta Guyot (1906-1995): leader in nursing education / Mary Louise Hoeller -- Sister Anne Bernadas (1913-1985): laughter within the mystery / Paula Richard -- Sister Mary Grace Danos (1915-1989): "for her monument, look around you" / Ethalee Mulhern -- Sister Jeanne Lugo (1920-1996): prophet of multi-cultural catechesis / Emilie Griffin -- Sister Aloysius Almerico (1905-1997): a woman of vision / Philippa Provenzano -- Sister Audrey Marie Detiege (1927-1989): biographer of Henrietta Delille / Doris Goudeaux.
Beyond bondage : free women of color in the Americas by
Maroon women in colonial Spanish America : case studies in the Circum-Caribbean from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries / Jane Landers -- Of life and freedom at the (tropical) hearth : El Cobre, Cuba, 1709-73 / María Elena Díaz -- In the shadow of the plantation : women of color and the Libres de fait of Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1685-1848 / Bernard Moitt -- "To be free is very sweet" : the manumission of female slaves in Antigua, 1817-26 / David Barry Gaspar -- "Do thou in gentle Phibia smile" : scenes from an interracial marriage, Jamaica, 1754-86 / Trevor Burnard -- The fragile nature of freedom : free women of color in the U.S. South / Loren Schweninger -- Out of bounds : emancipated and enslaved women in Antebellum America / Wilma King -- Free Black and Colored women in early-nineteenth-century Paramaribo, Suriname / Rosemarijn Hoefte, Jean Jacques Vrij -- Ana Paulinha de Queirós, Joaquina da Costa, and their neighbors : free women of color as household heads in rural Bahia (Brazil), 1835 / B.J. Barickman, Martha Few -- Libertas citadinas : free women of color in San Juan, Puerto Rico / Félix V. Matos Rodríguez -- Landlords, shopkeepers, farmers, and slave-owners : free Black female property-holders in colonial New Orleans / Kimberly S. Hanger -- Free women of color in Central Brazil, 1779-1832 / Mary C. Karasch -- Henriette Delille, free women of color, and Catholicism in Antebellum New Orleans, 1727-1852 / Virginia Meacham Gould -- Religious women of color in seventeenth-century Lima : Estefania de San Ioseph and Ursula de Jesu Christo / Alice L. Wood.
No Cross, No Crown by
Nineteenth-century New Orleans was a diverse city. The French-speaking Catholic Creoles, whether black, white, or racially mixed--so different from the city's English-speaking residents--inspired intense curiosity and speculation. But none of the city's inhabitants evoked as much wonder as did the Sisters of the Holy Family, whose mission was to evangelize slaves and free people of color and to care for the poor, sick, and elderly. These women, whose community still thrives, are portrayed in an account written between 1896 and 1898 by one of their sisters, Mary Bernard Deggs, who shortly before her death made it her mission to record the remarkable historical journey the women had taken to serve those of their race. Although Deggs did not officially join the Sisters of the Holy Family until 1873, she was a student at the sisters' early school on Bayou Road and thus would have known, as a child, Henriette Delille, the founder and first mother superior of the Sisters of the Holy Family, and the other women who joined her. This account captures, in a most graphic way, the founding of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans in 1842 and the difficult years that followed. It was not until 1852 that the foundresses were able to take their first official vows and exchange their blue percale gowns for black ones (and it was 1873 before they were permitted to wear a formal religious habit). Shortly before Delille's death in 1862, Union forces seized the city, and Delille's successor, Juliette Gaudin, faced dire economic circumstances. The war and postwar years economically devastated New Orleans and its population. Freed slaves poured into the city, unintentionally adding themselves to the already overwhelming mission of the sisters. Those were the poorest and most uncertain years the sisters were to face. We know very little about Sister Mary Bernard Deggs herself, but her history of the early years of the Sisters of