National Black Catholic History Month: St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart

The St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart, commonly known as the Josephites, are a community of U.S. based priests which has been devoted to serving people of African descent since 1871.

The group originally began as the English Foreign Mission Society of Saint Joseph, which sent priests to the U.S. to educate newly-freed people of African descent after the U.S. Civil War.

When the mission reorganized as an American-based group in 1893, taking their current name, Father Charles Randolph Uncles was among the founders of the new society.

The Josephites have remained dedicated to their mission of serving exclusively people of African descent in the U.S. in urban and rural communities. They operate schools and parishes, mostly in the South, in six states and the District of Columbia. Since the 1990s, the Josephites have brought dozens of priests from Nigeria to serve in historically black parishes in the U.S. The Josephite Harvest, the society's publication, may well be one of the longest running Catholic publications in the U.S. The Josephite Pastoral Center is a resource for books and other items of use to Catholic ministries serving black Americans (I am particularly fond of the calendar, and purchase one each year).

Learn more about the Josephites at their website.

(Image via CatholicExchange.com)

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National Black Catholic History Month: Father Charles Randolph Uncles

We've already discussed the claims Bishop James Augustine Healy (who was never known to publicly identify as black) and Father Augustus Tolton have to the title "first black American priest," but did you know there's also a third candidate?

Meet Father Charles Randolph Uncles.

Uncles was born about 1859 or 1860 in Baltimore, Md., (which had a significant population of black Catholics) to Lorenzo and Anna Uncles. The members of the Uncles family reportedly were fair-skinned enough to pass for white, but declined to do so. He was educated in Quebec, Canada, but later studied for the priesthood at St. Joseph Seminary in Baltimore.

He was ordained in Baltimore in 1891. That was a few years after Tolton's ordination and decades after Healy's ordination, but since Uncles was the only one of our three "first black American priest" candidates both to have identified as black and been ordained in the United States, he is often said to have the only true claim to the title. The first U.S. ordination of a black man merited mention in the New York Times the day after it happened.

For most of his life, Uncles taught students Latin, Greek and English at schools in Baltimore and upstate New York. He died July 21, 1933.

Father Uncles also had an important role to play in the founding of the Josephites, the subject of tomorrow's post.

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National Black Catholic History Month: Lyke Conference

James Patterson Lyke was born in 1939 in Chicago. He was ordained a priest in 1966, and later served as the first black Catholic priest in the state of Tennessee. In 1979, Pope John Paul II called him to serve as auxiliary bishop of Cleveland, Ohio, where he served until 1990. In 1991, he was named the archbishop of Atlanta, according to the Lyke Conference site.

Lyke was one of the leading forces behind Lead Me, Guide Me, the popular African-American Catholic hymnal.

He died of cancer on Dec. 27, 1992, at age 53.

In the spirit of Lyke's life and interests, the foundation named for him works at engaging "the richness and giftedness of the Black community in the vibrant nature of the Catholic Church" to develop "powerful and effective Black Catholic worship."

The foundation has hosted the Archbishop James P. Lyke Conference eight times since 2004, the year it started. The 2014 conference will be June 11 to June 15 at the DoubleTree Hotel in New Orleans.

Read more about Archbishop Lyke and the foundation and conference named after him at the Lyke Conference website.

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National Black Catholic History Month: Pope St. Victor I

Some aspects of The Roman Catholic Church as we know it -- indeed, most of modern Christianity -- would not exist without the efforts of Pope (St.) Victor I, said to have been the first black African pope: He decided that Easter, the celebration of Jesus Christ's Resurrection, would always be observed on a Sunday.

He also was the first to write Church documents in Latin instead of Greek.

Victor was born in northern Africa, probably in the area of Tripoli in modern-day Libya. Little is known about his early life. He became pope in 186 or 189 A.D., according to the Vatican.

Pope Victor died in the year 199. He may have been martyred, according to Catholic News Agency.

His feast day is July 28.

(image via The Q Continuum)

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National Black Catholic History Month: Mother Mary Lange

If Mother Mary Lange, OSP, is canonized, she will become the first black American woman saint.

Elizabeth Clarisse Lange was born in the late 18th century in what is now Haiti (some sources claim she was born in Cuba) to a wealthy family.
By 1813 or so, she was living in Baltimore, Maryland, where she was part of a community of French-speaking black Catholics. By the 1820s, she was educating black children in her home at her expense. In 1828, a priest approached her and two other black women about teaching more children and she explained that what she wanted most of all was to dedicate her life to God and become a nun.

Although no black women were nuns in the U.S. at that time, the priest and archbishop of the diocese agreed to sponsor her. She took vows and became known as Sister Mary in 1828, according to the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

She established and was the first superior general of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, which was the world's first order of nuns founded by a woman of African heritage. As part of the order, she nursed the sick during a cholera epidemic and worked as a domestic at a seminary, among other tasks, according to the Mother Lange Guild. After the Civil War, when black children who had been orphaned by the war came to Baltimore in droves, Mother Mary Lange headed efforts to care for them.

She died on Feb. 3, 1882, well into her 90s.

In 1991, with the approval of the Vatican, William Cardinal Keeler, then Baltimore's Archbishop, opened the formal investigation of Mother Mary Lange's life which many hope will lead to her canonization.

Read more about Mother Mary Lange at a website devoted to the cause for her canonization.

(Image via National Catholic Review)

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National Black Catholic History Month: Who was the first black Catholic in the Americas?

Who was the first black Catholic in the Americas? Nobody knows for sure, but there are some historical candidates for the position.

Maybe it was Estevanico, the sixteenth-century man who was the first person in modern recorded history both to have been born in Africa and to have spent time in what is now the continental USA (it's been rumored that he never gave up the Islamic faith of his youth, though).

Maybe it was even Pedro Alonso Nino, who sailed the ocean blue with Christopher Columbus in 1492 (there's a Facebook page devoted to him, too!). It could even have been Juan Valiente, the sixteenth-century conquistador who traveled with Pedro de Alvarado's trips to Chile and Guatemala and helped develop Santiago de Chile. Or Juan Garrido (John the Handsome), said to have been a freedman of West African heritage who traveled with Hernan Cortes to Mexico (and even may have had some role in the Tenochtitlan massacre).

We may never know.

We know for certain, though, that more than a decade before the first enslaved Africans were brought to U.S. shores, a child of African heritage born on January 3, 1606, was baptized in St. Augustine, Florida. The baptismal records are reportedly still in the storied city's archives.

(Image via Catholic-link.com)

Related:
It's National Black Catholic History Month
National Black Catholic History Month: Father Augustus Tolton
National Black Catholic History Month: St. Martin de Porres

National Black Catholic History Month: St. Martin de Porres

(Image via Catholic Apologetics)

Today is the feast day of St. Martin de Porres.

De Porres was born in Lima, Peru, in the 16th century as the son of a Panamanian freedwoman who is generally considered to have been of mixed Native and African ancestry and a white Spanish nobleman. He became a lay brother of the Dominican order when he was in his 20s.

A popular (apocryphal?) story about de Porres tells about the time when a colony of mice infested the monastery where he lived. Although his Dominican brothers wanted to poison the rodents, de Porres instead spoke quietly to one of the pests, promised them food as long as they stayed away from the humans and then led them all outside, away from the monastery. He is said to have kept his word.

Pope John XXIII canonized de Porres in 1962.

He is the patron saint of African Americans, mixed-race people, people seeking racial harmony, hairdressers, lottery winners and social justice.

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