NEWS FEATURE: Seeking sainthood for a 19th-century New Yorker

c. 1997 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ Monsignor Robert O’Connell, pastor of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Barclay Street in Lower Manhattan, is not asking for a pocketful of miracles. Just two will do to advance his cause: sainthood for Pierre Toussaint, born a slave in Haiti and came to be known in […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Monsignor Robert O’Connell, pastor of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Barclay Street in Lower Manhattan, is not asking for a pocketful of miracles.

Just two will do to advance his cause: sainthood for Pierre Toussaint, born a slave in Haiti and came to be known in the 19th century for his sanctity and acts of charity. The process of canonization requires that two miracles be attributed to Toussaint.


Founded in 1785, St. Peter’s is the oldest Catholic parish in New York state. It is also the church where Toussaint worshiped at 6 a.m. Mass every day for 60 years.

Toussaint is today advancing rapidly in his candidacy for sainthood. After a two-year review of historical records by the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Pope John Paul II has decreed Toussaint to be “venerable,” the lowest of three degrees of sanctity.

“We’re absolutely delighted; it’s a giant step toward canonization,” said O’Connell, vice postulator promoting Toussaint’s cause for sainthood. “It means all testimony is finished, and there is no argument over his virtue and no doubt about his sanctity.”

The next step is beatification, requiring a certified miracle. A second miracle would complete the process of canonization, making Toussaint the first black saint from North America.

“Rome needs these extra signs from heaven,” said O’Connell, “but the present pope has been known to waive these requirements if it is important to the country of the person being considered.”

Across the river in New Jersey, another priest, the Rev. Charles McTague of the Newark Archdiocese, also has cause to be jubilant over the Vatican’s action.

It was McTague’s amateur sleuthing as a young seminarian 56 years ago that located Toussaint’s lost burial place in the churchyard of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood.


Because of his role in identifying the gravesite, the priest was among the invited witnesses at the exhumation of Toussaint’s skeletal remains in 1990, and their interment under the high altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, making him the first layman to be entombed with New York’s deceased archbishops, and the first black.

“Toussaint’s remains integrated the crypt,” said the 77-year-old McTague, a former merchant mariner who is semi-retired from his chaplaincy at Stella Maris Chapel in Port Newark.

Toussaint was 87 when he died in 1853. He was born a slave on the Haitian plantation of Jean Berard. His mother was personal maid to Madame Berard. His grandmother, a free woman with a special, trusted place in the Berard family, taught him the rudiments of reading and writing. His owner gave him access to the manor library.

When a slave insurrection against French rule threatened, Berard sailed with his family to New York. He also took the young Pierre, whom he apprenticed to a hairdresser, and Pierre’s sister.

Berard died on a return trip to Haiti, leaving Toussaint to cope with supporting the family after their savings ran out. He did so on his earnings as a skilled hairdresser, building a thriving practice among ladies and children of New York’s best families.

Toussaint was given his freedom when Madame Berard was dying, but before and after, he devoted himself to the welfare of others. When others fled the city during the plague years, he remained to tend the sick and dying. He bought the freedom of other slaves, supported orphanages, and gave shelter to and trained homeless boys.


He married, lost a child, and adopted a niece. His religious devotion never diminished. In the city he was universally loved and respected, “God’s image carved in ebony,” wrote a memoirist.

McTague’s interest in Toussaint began when a 8-year-old African-American boy in a class he was preparing for Holy Communion at St. Peter Claver Church in Montclair, N.J., gave as an excuse for not doing his homework that it was pointless because blacks had no opportunities.”He said, `You can’t tell me that any black got anywhere,'”recalled the priest.

“That bothered me,” said McTague. “A week later I was attending a Catholic Interracial Conference in New York and ran across a copy of a review containing a story about Toussaint. I read it and found him to have been a remarkable man.”

The priest’s quest for the ex-slave’s grave led to the archives of the Archdiocese of New York, where he determined that Toussaint was interred at the Old St. Patrick’s cemetery at Mott and Mulberry streets, burial place for 30,000 early Catholic inhabitants of the city.

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“The problem was that no headstone identifiable as Toussaint’s could be found,” recalled McTague. “Church records had burned in a fire in 1886, and only a survey of names taken from gravestones at the turn of the century was available.”

Using graph paper, the priest plotted all the headstones, row by row, comparing legible stones with the survey names, until he came to a small brown sandstone marker so worn by more than a century of weather that no inscription could be detected by the naked eye.


Photographs he took of the marker revealed nothing.

“But when the negatives were studied with a strong magnifying glass, it brought up a very worn `…ssaint,”’ said the priest. “Then I knew I had found the place where Toussaint had been laid to rest.”

The skeletal remains of Toussaint, who died a free and wealthy man, were verified to be his by the Metropolitan Forensic Anthropological Team, medical experts often utilized by police departments to identify human remains in crime cases.

“In damp, rainy winter weather, the team spent 17 days digging with wooden spoons,” recalled O’Connell. “The casket had decomposed into dust. All that was left were the casket handles, some brass buttons, and the bones, every one in his body in place.”

MJP END GORDON

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