Byline: Michael R. Heinlein

For nearly 15 years, Henriette Delille (1812-62) remained committed to a call from God made difficult to answer on account of man’s sins. The reality was that no religious communities in New Orleans would accept her into their community, either racist themselves or unwilling to confront the systemic racism of the time. But on Oct. 15, 1851, Delille at last was able to profess poverty, chastity and obedience and give her life to Christ as a professed religious.

A few details of Delille’s profession are significant and shed light on the enormity of what she undertook that fall day in the chapel of the Ursuline convent in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Taking the religious name Marie Terese, Delille took upon herself a task of reforming religious life, much like her inspiration St. Teresa of Ávila. While Ávila, Spain, worked to overcome the lax and lavish lives of the Carmelites in her day, Delille had to overcome the prevalent racist mindset that plagued the Church of her time.

Delille’s entrance to religious life arrived outside of the customary norms of the day. Aspirants to religious life were young, came from relative affluence and were white. Delille was not of those. Delille was the fourth generation of freedpersons, her family having gone from slavery to owning slaves. She was expected to follow the course of her family’s matriarchs and form a liaison relationship with a white man, which afforded them a better life than marriage to a man of color like themselves. In fact, without the ties brought by marriage, the women who adhered to this plaçage system remained solely in charge of everything from finances to their children’s upbringing.

Delille’s mother groomed her to take up this way of life. Records indicate Delille entered into such a relationship early in her life, but it did not last long. It produced two children who both died in infancy. And not long after, a court declared her mother mentally insane. Just past 20 years of age, Delille found herself surrounded by grief and hardship.

In 1836, Delille experienced a conversion, and her faith was intensified and reinvigorated. After receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation, which was received in those days by only the most devout in practice of the Faith, Delille became a woman wholly committed to the Lord. Her guiding motto, written in a prayer book, captures what defined her heart and spurred her vocation: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”

Her desire to live the Faith more fully brought her closer to like-minded friends, Juliette and Josephine. Together they engaged in ministry to enslaved and free girls and women of color. Laying the foundation for her order, which at the time was known as the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she wrote their rule of life in 1836. Through her motivation and vision, this new congregation would bring Christ to the peripheries of their city and beyond.

Delille’s new congregation chose “one heart and one soul” as its motto, reminiscent of the apostolic way of life in Christianity’s earliest days. Their desire was threefold. First, they sought to “bring back Glory to God and the salvation of the neighbor by a charitable and edifying behavior.” They were committed to be Christian women of utmost authenticity and integrity. Second, the women resolved to help each other in this task and in the work they set out to accomplish. Third, they pledged to serve those in need throughout the wider community. Their mission was to care for the poor, sick and elderly, “the first and dearest objects of the solicitude of the congregation.” And the new sisters were intent on teaching “the principal mysteries of religions and the most important points of Christian morality” to both slave and free children.

The congregation would not have existed, too, without the support and patronage of New Orleans’ archbishop Anotine Blanc and his vicar general Father Etienne Rousselon. The latter was a source of generosity and support to the fledgling community and a spiritual mentor to Delille. Both clerics assisted the women in the formalization of their community and their recognition within the Church. By 1842, the congregation became known officially and for good as the Sisters of the Holy Family.

As the congregation grew, Delille contributed inheritance she received after her mother’s death to begin growing an institutional presence. By the 1850s, Delille’s community had a convent with classrooms, operated an orphanage and educated young girls in literacy and catechism while teaching them skills such as sewing. The education they provided to enslaved children was outlawed at the time. Their service to the sick included the victims of a yellow fever epidemic, and they also brought into their home elderly infirm women, a first in America.

Delille’s generosity and love was known to everyone who knew her. She responded to the Lord’s call with great love, requisite perseverance and heroic virtue. The last decade of Delille’s life was dedicated to attracting new members to the congregation. At the time of her death, 12 sisters of mixed racial descent resided at the convent.

Delille truly was a mother, not just to the congregation of sisters she established, but to all she encountered. Parish sacramental records show she even served as godmother and marriage witness in many circumstances. Delille died on Nov. 16, 1862, at the age of 50. An obituary summed up her calling “for the love of Jesus Christ she had become the humble and devout servant of the slaves.” Delille’s cause for canonization opened in 1988, and she was declared venerable by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.

Born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, on Dec. 29, 1937, Bertha Bowman was the granddaughter of a slave and the only child of a doctor and a teacher. Her father abandoned a career in New York after an aunt convinced him African Americans in the south had difficulties getting quality medical care. Bowman saw up close the prejudice and racism produced. Bowman was taught that “we must return love, no matter what.”

Both parents instilled in their daughter a deep love for their heritage and a profound respect for family and community elders. “I’m what they used to call an ‘old folks’ child,” Bowman often said. Her experiences provided the foundation for her robust faith and equipped her to cope with the difficulties faced amid a segregated south. As she learned, and would know by living, “God makes a way out of no way.”

From the older generation she came to know the Scripture, learn the songs, dances and customs of their people. And that is where Bowman learned to have a big heart that loved and helped everyone. “When you help somebody, that’s how you become big, that’s how you become proud, not by getting things, but by helping somebody and leaving the world better than you found it.”

The course of Bowman’s life would change when a school was opened up in her Canton, Mississippi, hometown by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration from La Crosse, Wisconsin. Holy Child Jesus mission church and school had been established and served by missionary priests and sisters to provide a better education for Black children, whose education suffered from the effects of segregation, but it was open to all. The Gospel joyfulness of those missionaries attracted young Bowman to the Catholic faith, and she converted at age 9. This same joyfulness became a hallmark trait of hers as well. Bowman was so attracted to their way of life at 15, she went on a hunger strike to get her parents’ permission to enter as an aspirant with her teachers’ order.

As an aspirant for the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Bowman moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where she began high school at St. Rose Convent School. This was at a time when many convents of white sisters often did not have an African American in their midst. Bowman’s arrival was a bit of a news sensation. One local story that covered her arrival in La Crosse came under the headline “Negro Aspirant.”

As if moving away from home and beginning a new life at such a young age was not enough, life in the convent did not protect her from open racial prejudice. But Bowman worked very hard to win over the other sisters and persevere in entering the community. She did so with her cheerful, outgoing demeanor and tenacious love for Christ and the Church. Another setback came in the form of tuberculosis, which necessitated a year of treatments at a sanitarium east of La Crosse.

Sister Thea, her name given upon taking religious vows, was intellectually gifted. Her first assignments were teaching grade school in La Crosse and then at home in Canton, Mississippi, and her beloved Holy Child Jesus School. Bowman left Mississippi for Washington, D.C., in 1965. There, she obtained a master’s and doctoral degrees in English at The Catholic University of America. In 1972, Bowman returned to La Crosse to take up a professorship at her alma mater Viterbo College.

Bowman came of age in the midst of America’s struggle for civil rights, and the racial and social tumult of the 1960s was immensely formative for her. She recognized the need not only to speak up on behalf of her African American brothers and sisters but to help heal a society, culture and Church deeply wounded by racism and its effects. She wanted to bring great awareness of her beloved culture and promote greater harmony and mutual respect among people who looked different from one another.

After the only child returned home to take care of her parents in 1978, Sister Thea served as director for intercultural affairs in the Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi. In her work there, Bowman dedicated herself to overcoming the divisions in the Church and society and also served as a founding faculty member and later director of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University in New Orleans.

As a writer, teacher, musician and evangelist, Sister Thea preached the Gospel to clergy and laity alike, promoting ecclesial and cultural harmony and reconciliation. With her prophetic voice, Bowman was a tireless spokeswoman for the Black Catholic experience.

In 1984, Bowman’s life drastically took on the form of the cross. Not only did she bury both of her parents, but Bowman was also diagnosed with breast cancer. Regular chemotherapy treatments weakened Bowman physically, limiting much of her movement to a wheelchair, but her mind and heart remained strong. Pledging to “live until I die,” Sister Thea remained wholeheartedly committed to her ministry, which included travels around the world, during her battle with cancer. About a year before she died, Bowman gave a rousing speech before the bishops of the United States, articulating for them the Black Catholic experience in this country and the need for their fuller participation in the life of the Church.

She died on March 30, 1990, and her cause for canonization was opened in 2018. She wanted her grave marker to read, “She tried,” explaining, “I want people to remember that I tried to love the Lord and that I tried to love them, and how that computes is immaterial.”

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter @HeinleinMichael.