24763: HaitiFactsCheck (pub) Church seeking sainthood for Haitian nun

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HaitiFactsCheck@aol.com

*Church seeking sainthood for Haitian nun*
*

*By Foster Klug
*ASSOCIATED PRESS*
**

BALTIMORE -- In an era of slavery, a Haitian immigrant called Mother 
Mary Lange led the country's first community of black nuns, gracefully 
matching wits with a slave-owning priest and dodging insults from racist 
neighbors.
   Mother Lange also established the country's oldest continuing 
Catholic school for black children more than 30 years before the 1863 
Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the United States.
   Today, the Archdiocese of Baltimore seeks to formally recognize 
Mother Lange's work and make her the first black U.S. saint -- a role 
many believe she has served in all but name since her death in 1882. 
   "She has been a saint in the eyes of many people for a long time," 
said Sister Julia Apolonio, an Oblate nun who said that four years of 
daily prayer to Mother Lange helped her walk again without pain after 
her body was twisted and broken by lupus and repeated surgeries. "She 
does answer the prayers of the people who pray to her."
   In December, 2,000 pages of painstakingly compiled documentation 
formally were sent to the Vatican for review. It was the culmination of 
a 14-year effort that occasionally resembled a densely plotted mystery 
novel, with intrepid priests and nuns plowing through crumbling archives 
in Baltimore, Cuba and Haiti.
   "It is a relief, but we know it's not finished," said the Rev. John 
Bowen, 80, a Sulpician priest from Baltimore who is leading the effort 
to canonize Mother Lange.
   Within nine months, the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of 
Saints is expected to determine whether Mother Lange's case is worthy of 
consideration. If it does, and if proof of a miracle is then found, the 
church would beatify her. With evidence of a second miracle, she would 
be named a saint.
   Frustrated researchers often were stumped by language barriers and 
documents rendered missing or incomplete because of the revolutions that 
convulsed the Caribbean at the end of the 18th century, when Mother 
Lange was born in either Haiti or Cuba.
   The picture of Mother Lange that emerges, though incomplete, stands 
in contrast to the oppressive lives of other black women living at the 
time south of the Mason-Dixon Line -- the border between Maryland and 
Pennsylvania and, before and during the Civil War, the boundary between 
the slave states and the free states.
   "What striking things she did," said Cardinal William Keeler, the 
archbishop of Baltimore. "It must have taken great courage and holiness."
   She was born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange about 1784. After she fled the 
violence of the Haitian slave revolt in about 1812, she settled in 
Baltimore, one of the East Coast port cities that Haitian refugees 
flocked to during the period.
   Mother Lange began teaching black children in her home, using her 
own money. In 1828, she founded St. Frances Academy with the help of the 
Rev. James Joubert, a French Sulpician priest who supported the 
education of black people. Several congregations rejected her attempts 
to become a nun, so Joubert helped Mother Lange and three other women 
take their vows in 1829 and start the Oblate Sisters of Providence, 
which now has about 100 members.
   Life for the community of nuns was hard. They suffered insults 
because they wore habits and crosses, which some white Catholics 
considered offensive. After Mother Lange and three other nuns nursed 
victims of Baltimore's 1832 cholera epidemic, city officials neglected 
to mention their service when honoring others.
   In 1835, the women were asked to do domestic work at St. Mary's 
Seminary in Baltimore. Before she agreed to do the job, Mother Lange 
sent a letter to the head of the seminary asking that he not "miss the 
respect which is due to the state we have embraced and the holy habit 
which we have the honor to wear."
   It was an extraordinary letter, in that Mother Lange, a black woman, 
was writing to a white priest with slave holdings, Mr. Bowen said. "She 
was willing to risk a lot."
   No black person in the United States has been named a saint.