(1784/1794–1882)
Country: Cuba, United States
Servant of God Mary Elizabeth Lange was a fighter. Elizabeth was born to a well-to-do Haitian family. Her family having fled Haiti just before the coming revolution, Elizabeth spent her childhood in the Haitian community in Cuba. Around 1813, she and her mother left Cuba for the United States. While Mrs. Lange soon returned to Cuba, Elizabeth settled in Baltimore, in the slave state of Maryland. There, no amount of inheritance could buy a Black woman a place in society. Elizabeth’s light skin afforded her none of the privilege it had in Cuba, priests and even sisters owned enslaved people, and Elizabeth’s beautiful French and Spanish would get her nowhere if her English didn’t improve. Unconcerned with the prejudice she knew she would face, Elizabeth settled into the Haitian expatriate community and began to serve.
Well educated and of independent means, Elizabeth started a school for free Black children in her Baltimore home. Though it wasn’t an illegal venture, Maryland in the 1820s was certainly not a place where educating Black children was encouraged. Indeed, the first public schools serving Black children wouldn’t open until after the Civil War. But Elizabeth and her friend Marie Magdalene Balas knew that these children needed an education, so they set about to provide one. They succeeded for some years, but a lack of funding forced them to close the school in 1827.
As discouraging as this turn of events must have been, Elizabeth was soon to see the hand of Providence in it. She approached Fr. James Hector Joubert, a French Sulpician priest, with her concerns about the needs of the community. As it turned out, Fr. Joubert had himself become frustrated in his attempts to catechize his illiterate parishioners. Here was the solution! Fr. Joubert would arrange funding for Elizabeth, and Elizabeth would provide the school.
But Elizabeth longed for more than just work. She wanted the unattainable: she wanted to be a religious sister. It was impossible, not just in the South but in the whole country. There were no orders for women of African descent, and discrimination even within the Church made the idea of joining a white order laughable. But with Fr. Joubert’s support, Elizabeth founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first successful order for African American women in the Church. The order was devoted to the service of Black people, especially through education. Elizabeth took the simple name Mother Mary.
The sisters founded a school for girls of color, nearly forty years before the Emancipation Proclamation, and started a program to train teachers, both acts of defiance in a culture that found the education of Black people threatening. Soon they offered night school for adults and vocational training, opened an orphanage and a home for widows, offered spiritual direction, cared for the sick and the elderly, and taught catechism. More than anything, they taught a people degraded by slavery and prejudice how to hope, how to believe in their dignity again.
When the cholera epidemic of 1832 began, the sisters set to work alongside many of the white sisters of Baltimore. The white sisters were publicly commended for their service; the Oblates received no such recognition. Over the years, they endured scorn and contempt from the white community, even from white Catholics who resented the sight of a Black woman in a habit. They were ridiculed, physically threatened, and regularly forced to walk in the street rather than share the sidewalk with white people. They endured prejudice from racist Catholics on one side and from anti-Catholics on the other, but they persisted in their dedication to the Lord and their work in the service of his people.
All this became even more difficult in 1843, when the sisters’ patron Fr. Joubert died. Mother Mary had exhausted her inheritance, and as Fr. Joubert’s funds dried up, the sisters found themselves in great financial difficulty. Their unsupportive bishop insisted that they disband. But Mother Mary hadn’t come so far just to be forced out of religious life. She refused to allow the bishop to dissolve her order. Instead, she and the sisters began taking in laundry, working as maids and cooks—whatever it took to pay the bills and stay together. They made it through that financial crisis, through the era of the Know-Nothing Party and their anti-Catholic violence, through the Civil War, and through its aftermath.
Mother Mary’s motto was “Our sole wish is to do the will of God.” Once she had discerned that something was God’s will, nothing could stop Mother Mary and the Oblate Sisters of Providence. She has been described as strict, even severe in her leadership of the fledgling congregation. How else was she to shepherd these souls entrusted to her when wolves loomed on every side? But shepherd she did, and none of them were lost.
In fact, the order continued to grow. By 1860, the Oblate Sisters were running all the Catholic schools for children of color in Baltimore. They spread throughout the United States and even to other countries. By the time of Mother Mary’s death in 1882, there were fifty sisters in her order, freeborn women and women who had been born into slavery, all of them daughters of a woman of unfailing determination.
Mary Elizabeth Lange is a witness not just to those communities experiencing prejudice but to all who need encouragement to persevere. Through her intercession, may we fight unceasingly to do the will of God.
Servant of God Mary Elizabeth Lange, pray for us!
This excerpt from Pray for Us is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.
