None Of Us Can Change History
A widowed, single mother of eleven children has a word or two for politicians and parents who fear their children will “feel bad” if they learn about the murder of Emmett Till, the mob castrations and lynchings of Black men and boys, Bull Connor, the exclusion of Black athletes from professional sports, and the numbers of the nation’s Founders who owned slaves:
“Shhhhhh!
“Listen!
“Kids are resilient and it’s you adults who are afraid.”
Two-hundred years after her death, we can almost hear Elizabeth Seton telling to her daughters, “Good for you. Keep telling our truth. It’s History. History doesn’t cause guilt and shame. It’s born of Courage and the birthplace of Change.”
And, as the first native-born saint of the United States, she just might have some insight into History;
In modern day parlance, Elizabeth Seton’s life “had its ups and downs” - the too-early deaths of her mother and husband - and emotional burdens – responsibility for rearing eleven children.
The second daughter of the Chief Health Officer for the Port of New York, her mother died in childbirth when Elizabeth was three years old; as was the custom of the times – to provide a mother for his daughters - her father remarried the following year. Charlotte Amelia Barday often included Elizabeth in her charitable rounds with the Church of England. After five children, the couple separated and Elizabeth was rejected by her stepmother.
At nineteen, she married trans-Atlantic merchant William Seton, 25, and continued the charity work she learned from her stepmother as a 1797 cofounder of New York’s The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. At his death, the couple accepted her father-in-law’s six children, in addition to their own five. William died of tuberculosis complicated by the stresses of his failing import business in 1803, forcing his widow to open an in-home academy for young women – again, a custom for widows of social standing. After parents learned of her conversion to Roman Catholicism, she lost students and accepted a string of temporary positions before moving her family to Emmitsburg, Maryland in 1808 to eventually establish St. Joseph’s Academy and Free School for girls. In Maryland, Elizabeth was joined by Catholic women from around the country and, at the urging of Sulpician priests who had fled France’s Reign of Terror, they began the Sisters of St. Joseph - America’s first community of religious women - on July 31, 1809.
Elizabeth and eighteen others made their first annual vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and service to the poor in 1813 and, by 1817, they had opened an orphanage in Philadelphia and a new mission in New York. In 1850, the Emmitsburg community merged with the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (Vincentians) to become of first American branch of this – originally – French worldwide community.
Two of Elizabeth’s daughters died of tuberculosis in 1812 and 1816; at age 46, Elizabeth died of tuberculosis in early 1821.
In 2016, Dayton University historian Shannen Dee Williams, Ph.D. encouraged the members of the (Roman Catholic) Leadership Conference of Women Religious to examine the root causes of injustice, particularly racism, in their own communities. (The LCWR represents nearly 80 percent of the approximately 49,000 women religious in the US.)
Researchers found that, at age 3, Mother Seton inherited an enslaved man in the will of her grandfather. Arizona State University historian Catherine O’Donnell, Ph.D., author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, believes he escaped during the American Revolutionary War, which ended when Elizabeth was seven.
One-hundred-and-one years after her death, six congregations of the Sisters of Charity Foundation who trace their origins to Elizabeth Ann Seton and the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph/Daughters of Charity publicly recognized that, before slavery was outlawed in 1865, the two original congregations owned and sold slaves in Maryland and benefited from slave labor in New Orleans and St. Louis.
During Mother Seton’s lifetime one of the schools she founded accepted payment for tuition that used the proceeds from the sale of a slave and accepted other payments in the form of slave labor,
Subsequent research revealed that the two Maryland congregations owned at least three enslaved people, sold slaves on at least two occasions and Sisters of Charity benefited from slave labor in the construction of their Charity Hospital in Louisiana and Mullanphy Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.
Sr. Catherine Mary Norris of the Daughters of Charity, who chairs the Federation’s board of directors, recently acknowledged that the involvement in slavery by the daughters of Mother Seton should not go unknown: “We need to know our own history. We need to own it and be willing to acknowledge it and move on.”
In a letter issued in the name of the Sisters of Charity Federation, Sister Norris and Sister of Charity of Seton Hill Grace Hartzog, Federation executive director, declared:
“While the institution of slavery and the exploitation of enslaved people was deeply engrained in the society and economy of the 19th century, this shameful historical reality does not diminish our profound regret and dismay today…
“Slavery is an indelible stain on our nation and conscience that has permanent and painful repercussions most profoundly for Black Americans. We believe that only by shining a light on difficult, shared truths can we truly move forward in unity.”
In a lesson for politicians, school boards and parents who are attempting to challenge or limit how schools teach about what author Jim Wallis, founding director of the Georgetown Center on Faith and Justice, has called “America’s original sin,” Sr. Norris acknowledged, “None of us can change history. It’s how we can learn from it and go from there” that is important. “There’s been a lot of broken trust that needs to be rebuilt. We have to start someplace, and this is one small place we can start.”
While more than a dozen universities – including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia – have publicly acknowledged their ties to slavery and the slave trade, the most significant public recognition of the role of slavery in the history of Roman Catholic religious communities – of men and women – comes from the efforts and research of students, faculty and alumni of Jesuit Georgetown University.
“The university itself owes its existence to this history,” Georgetown historian Adam Rothman told The New York Times. In fact, the 1838 sale of 272 men, women and children – often donated by prosperous parishioners - remains significant for its sheer size. By June 2019, the Georgetown Memory Project had identified 8,425 descendants of slaves sold by the Jesuits in 1838 and close to half of them were still alive.
A document dated June 19, 1838 records the sale of 272 slaves to the owners of three Louisiana plantations to finance the construction of Georgetown College.
An article available through the Georgetown Memory Project details the sale of these slaves, their transport to Louisiana and their subsequent brutal treatment:
“A few priests expressed qualms about the morality of human trafficking to Jesuit authorities, although most were concerned with the threat a heavily Protestant South would undoubtedly present to the slaves’ Catholic faith… In letters written to Jesuit superiors in Maryland, one priest who accidentally crossed paths with the slaves in Louisiana after the sale bemoaned the fact that the slaves couldn’t practice Catholicism.”
The 1838 sale – equivalent to $3.3 million in 2017 – was organized by two of Georgetown’s Jesuit presidents - Thomas F. Mulledy and William McSherry - to pay off the struggling school’s debt. In response to recent student and alumni protests, their names have been removed from two campus buildings.
Although the Nineteenth Century Catholic Church did not consider slaveholding to be immoral, some Jesuits were more concerned about the “souls” of their slaves than the brutality of Southern slavery and the separation of husbands and wives and their children. “It would be better to suffer financial disaster than suffer the loss of our souls with the sale of slaves,” wrote Rev. Jan Roothaan, the Jesuit superior general in Rome at the time, who was initially reluctant to authorize the sale.
On December 3, 1839, Pope Gregory XVI issued the papal bull “In Supremo Apostolatus,” barring Catholics from engaging in “this traffic in Blacks… no matter what pretext or excuse”
In April 2017, Father Timothyt Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, addressed a gathering of descendants of some of those slaves:
“Today the Society of Jesus, which helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say: We have greatly sinned, in our thoughts and in our words, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do.”
In recent years, other religious communities have begun to deal honestly with their histories. The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky, who owned 30 slaves at the time of Emancipation, joined the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine and the Sisters of Loretto in a 2000 prayer service at which they formally apologized for their slaveholding. In 2012, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth established a monument honoring the descendants of their former slaves.
“In spite of my repugnance for having Negro slaves, we may be obliged to purchase some,” Sister Rose Philippine Duchesne, who established the Society of the Sacred Heart in the United States, wrote in 1822 – a year before the community bought their first enslaved man.
In 2018, the Religious of the Sacred Heart held a memorial ceremony in Grand Coteau, Louisiana unveiling a monument honoring the 150 slaves they once owned in Louisiana and Missouri. The United States and Canada province of the Society of the Sacred Heart established a Committee on Slavery, Accountability and Reconciliation in 2016 with the mandate to “recover the story of slavery in our early days in this country” and “to commit to truth, healing and reconciliation for a better future.”
By cross referencing the handwritten records and house journals of their convents with baptismal and other documents from nearby Catholic parishes, the Sisters have been able to trace the family trees of their former slaves and offer some of their descendants a understanding of their family histories.
“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?’”
Sister Osiek, who led the Society of the Sacred Heart’s committee on slavery and reconciliation, said her order wanted the descendants to know that their ancestors had played a vital role in developing and sustaining the convent and school.
“We couldn’t have done it without you,” she said, describing 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.”
In 2022, America, politicians and would-be-powerbrokers are attempting to gain power – at the community state and national levels – by perpetuating the myth that honestly teaching the history of America’s original sin will cause children to “feel bad,”
Any good, responsible and ethical therapist/counselor will tell you that no one can make you “feel” anything – including guilt and shame or just plain “bad” for something that happened generations ago. History – knowing, understanding, accepting even the most unpleasant history – can allow us to feel empathy, outrage at an injustice like slavery or racial prejudice and discrimination, and a determination to change work for change.
If we listen carefully, we might hear Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s response to those who want to “protect the feelings” of children if they learn an honest History:
“Oh, pshaw!”