By Kathy-Ann Gobin
FAIRFIELD—An historical, enlightening and emotional journey of Black Catholic sisters in the Catholic Church was the subject of the third installment of the Bishop’s Lecture Series at Sacred Heart University.
“Black history is and always has been Catholic history,” said Dr. Shannen Williams, an associate professor of history at the University of Dayton. She is the author of the book Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle.
Williams explained that her discovery of an article about the National Black Sisters Conference during her studies at Rutgers University led her on a quest for more than 10 years to uncover the contributions of Black religious and lay women that had previously and often purposely been overlooked.
“In my book, I try to recover the voices of a group of Black American Church women whose lives, labors and struggles have been systematically ignored, routinely dismissed as insignificant, and too often reduced to myth,” Williams said.
About 200 people attended the Bishop’s Lecture Series held at the Edgerton Center for the Performing Arts on Sacred Heart University’s campus. The lecture series provides opportunities for compelling adult faith formation regarding catechetical, theological or pastoral issues of contemporary importance.
Also: read full transcript of lecture
During her lecture, Williams explained that as a lifelong Catholic, she had not seen a Black religious sister while she was growing up, adding that even her mother who grew up in Savannah, Ga., and attended Catholic schools also did not know of any Catholic nuns. In fact, the first Black nun Williams said she saw was Sister Mary Clarence, the fictional character portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg in the 1992 Hollywood movie, Sister Act.
Williams unravels the story of America’s real sister act through her research that led her to archival sources, previously sealed church records and out-of-print books and periodicals.
“It is impossible to narrate Black sisters’ journey in the United States accurately and honestly without confronting the Church’s largely unacknowledged and unreconciled histories of colonialism, slavery and segregation,” Williams said, noting that the lives and labors of these women withstood anti-black prejudice, violence and threats.
Resilience and faith persevered but not without much struggle.
“I recover an overlooked chapter in the history of the long African-American freedom struggle: a tradition of sustained Black Catholic resistance to white supremacy and exclusion, that most scholars argue does not exist,” Williams said.
Her research, which also involved over 150 oral history interviews, proved otherwise. One of those interviews was with Dr. Patricia Grey, who was denied entrance into a Catholic sisterhood because she was not white. Dr. Grey later entered the Pittsburgh Sisters of Mercy as the first Black sister of that order and, in 1968, founded the Black Sisters Conference.
Upon their meeting, Dr. Grey, who ultimately left religious life, implored Williams to tell the whole story of Black nuns in the United States and gave her a box filled with her personal archive of her time in religious life.
Williams recalled the conversation with Dr. Grey, saying, “’We, the National Black Sisters Conference, were not the first Black sisters to revolt in the church,’ she quietly declared. If you can, try to tell all of our stories,’” a recollection Williams shared, her voice tinged with the emotional weight of the realization and responsibility of the task at hand.
What she did discover is detailed in her book published in 2022. It includes the establishment of the three Black religious Orders: the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of the Holy Family and the Franciscan Handmaids of Mary.
Williams’ presentation, which was peppered with photos of the sisters and old newspaper clippings, chronicled how women of color seeking admittance into the sisterhood would often be denied based on race. Archival correspondence among religious members unwittingly document that white sisters were not willing to live with Black sisters, or the concern that fewer white women would want to join the sisterhood if Black sisters were a part of their community.
Williams’ book also underscores tough decisions women of color had to make when seeking admission into religious life which in many cases required the renouncement of their African-American community so they could “pass” for white and be accepted into religious life.
According to Williams, Black sisters also had to fight to be able to wear the same habit as other sisters in the same order. In some instances, the design of the sisters’ habits intentionally obscured their faces.
“Habits covered parts of the face so people wouldn’t know if they were black or white,” Williams said.
The revelations of the journey of women of color in religious life is complex and intertwined with the social mores of the day.
“I didn’t know about the nuns, about the history,” said Luisa Fairborne, a parishioner of St. Philip in Norwalk, who attended the lecture. “That’s the grace of God,” she said of the nuns’ perseverance in the face of adversity and discrimination.
Martin and Kathleen Hesling of St. Leo Parish in Stamford both expressed gratitude for Williams’ work of telling the untold stories of the Black sisters. Williams said that doing so was challenging.
“I didn’t lose my faith. I didn’t know if the Catholic Church had a place for me,” Williams said, adding that telling the stories kept her going. “These women were at peace, I wanted to know that peace.”
Williams said there are three Black Catholic sisters currently on the road to sainthood within the church. They are Venerable Mother Mary Lange, who was the foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore in 1828, Venerable Mother Henriette Delille, foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans in 1842, and Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, who was a member of the pioneering generation of African-American Catholic sisters who began to desegregate the nation’s historically white Roman Catholic sisterhoods after World War II.
“This isn’t Black Catholic history,” Williams said. “This is every Catholic’s history.”
