This archive report was first published on 4 August 2019.
Published on August 4, 2019, a recent study revealed that many Catholic nuns in the United States had ties to slavery, a history that has been largely overlooked.
As a child growing up in New York City, I lived just blocks from a convent that ran a bookstore and a community festival that became a highlight of my childhood summers. My mother and her family, who emigrated from the Bahamas to Staten Island, even lived for a time on a farm run by Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and a candidate for sainthood.
However, it was not until I stumbled upon this history during my reporting on Georgetown that I discovered the dark truth about the Catholic Church's involvement in slavery. The Jesuit priests, who founded and ran Georgetown, were among the largest slaveholders in Maryland. Similarly, many Catholic orders relied on slave labor, and some even accepted slaves as payment for tuition to their schools or handed over their human property as payment for debts.
According to Mary Ewens, the author of 'The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America,' seven of the eight first orders of Catholic nuns established in the United States owned slaves by the 1820s. A more recent study by Joseph G. Mannard revealed that an eighth order did as well, at least for a time.
Historians say that it was not unusual for American-born priests and nuns to grow up in slaveholding families, and many orders relied on slave labor. Wealthy supporters and relatives of the nuns also donated enslaved people to the convents, and some nuns bought, sold and bartered enslaved people.
