Lange, Mary Elizabeth (Elizabeth Clarisse)

Impact on the world

Founded a school for Black children in Baltimore using her own home and money in 1828, then in 1829 co-founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence with a sympathetic French priest, establishing the first permanent religious congregation of Black Catholic women in the United States and becoming, as its superior general, the first African American to hold that position in any Catholic religious order; she led the congregation for decades despite being repeatedly barred from joining any existing white congregation due to pervasive anti-Black racism within the American Catholic Church itself, and in 2023 Pope Francis declared her 'Venerable,' advancing her toward potential sainthood.

Life & background

Born in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, around 1789 to a mother said to be the daughter of a Jewish plantation owner and an enslaved African woman, Lange's family fled to Cuba during the Haitian Revolution, where she received an excellent education before immigrating to the United States in the early 1800s and eventually settling in Baltimore, then home to a substantial population of free Black Americans and French-speaking Afro-Caribbean refugees. Recognizing the inadequacy of existing schools to serve Baltimore's growing free Black population, she opened her own school for 'girls of color' using her own resources in 1828, then partnered the following year with Father James Nicholas Joubert, himself a refugee from the same Haitian violence, to found the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first permanent Catholic congregation of Black women religious anywhere in the United States, decades before the Civil War would end slavery in the country where she lived. Taking the name Sister Mary and serving as the new order's first superior general, Lange led a community that explicitly welcomed formerly enslaved women into its ranks, with eight of the order's first forty members having previously been enslaved themselves, and whose sisters educated children, ran evening classes for adults, sheltered widows and orphans, and personally nursed the dying during Baltimore's 1832 cholera epidemic. The order expanded over the following century into 18 U.S. states and several countries, including Cuba and Costa Rica, and Lange led it through decades of institutional racism, financial hardship, and outright hostility from segments of the broader American Catholic establishment before her death in 1882; her cause for sainthood, opened in 1991, advanced when Pope Francis declared her Venerable in June 2023, one of only a handful of African Americans to reach that stage of Catholic canonization.

Sources

1. Oblate Sisters of Providence); National Catholic Register; USCCB (On the Road to Sainthood); Global Sisters Report; Miami Times