Greeley, Julia

Impact on the world

After her 1880 conversion to Catholicism in Denver, Greeley spent nearly four decades pulling a small red wagon through the city's streets after dark, delivering food, coal, and clothing to impoverished families specifically under cover of night so she would not embarrass those too proud to be seen accepting charity from a poor Black woman; she is now the only laywoman among six African American Catholic sainthood candidates, alongside Augustus Tolton, Mary Lange, Henriette Delille, Pierre Toussaint, and Thea Bowman, with her cause for canonization formally opened by the Archdiocese of Denver in 2016.

Life & background

Born into slavery in Hannibal, Missouri sometime between the early 1830s and late 1840s, with the exact date unknown even to Greeley herself, she was permanently blinded in her right eye as a young child when an enslaver's whip, aimed at beating her mother, struck her instead, an injury that left her informally known for much of her life as 'one-eyed Julia.' Freed under Missouri's own 1865 emancipation act, since the state's status as a border territory had placed it outside the reach of the federal Emancipation Proclamation, Greeley worked as a domestic servant for white families across several states before settling in Denver, where she entered the household of Colorado's first territorial governor, William Gilpin, and his wife. Baptized into the Catholic Church at Denver's Sacred Heart Parish in 1880, she immersed herself completely in its sacramental life, becoming a daily communicant who reportedly considered Holy Communion her only necessary nourishment, joining the Secular Franciscan Order in 1901, and despite suffering from severe, undisclosed arthritis throughout her later years, visiting every fire station in Denver on the first Friday of each month to distribute religious literature to firefighters regardless of their own faith. She spent decades secretly delivering food, fuel, and clothing by wagon to needy families after dark specifically to spare them public embarrassment, once donating her own burial plot rather than allow a deceased Black man to be buried in a pauper's grave, and earned such deep respect from Denver's Catholic community that, upon her June 1918 death, her body lay in repose at Sacred Heart Church, a first for any Catholic layperson in the city's history that has never since been repeated; roughly a thousand mourners filed past her coffin. Her cause for sainthood, opened in 2016, made her the first person from Colorado ever proposed for canonization, and in 2017 her remains were moved into Denver's Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, where the presiding bishop reportedly remarked that she would be the first person ever buried there, not a bishop or a priest, but a laywoman and a former slave.

Sources

1. Colorado Encyclopedia; Julia Greeley Guild (juliagreeley.org); National Catholic Register; Catholic Star Herald; MAVCOR Journal