c. 2000 Religion News Service

BALTIMORE _ Sister Reparata Clarke remembers clearly the day she decided to abandon a career in teaching to pursue her dream of entering a convent.

“I had a teacher in the ninth grade who left teaching and went to Canada to become a nun,” said Clarke, recalling the day more than 50 years ago when she learned her favorite teacher had left the Baltimore, Md., public school system. “That inspired me. I thought if she can do that, then I can do it too.”

She was almost right.

As a 23-year-old black Catholic during the 1940s, Clarke was barred from practically every one of the nation’s convents.

“One father told me since I was so very fair-skinned that I should try to get into one of the white orders,” remembered Clarke, “but I thought that was stupid. I didn’t want to do that.”

She found an open door at the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore, the nation’s first religious order for Catholic women of African descent.

“I was proud to go to the Oblates,” said Clarke. “Everybody had respect for them. Everybody knew who they were.”

Barred from joining their white sisters at other convents, aspiring Native American nuns and those of African descent began establishing their own religious orders in the United States as early as 1829, when Caribbean immigrant Mary Elizabeth Lange founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence.

Thirteen years later came the the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans, followed in 1916 by the Franciscan Handmaids of Mary in Savannah, Ga., which became the largest predominantly African-American Franciscan order, and in 1935 the Oblate Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Native American women in South Dakota.

“Everything was so segregated, we weren’t always welcomed where we should have been,” said Clarke, now the archivist for the Sisters of Providence. “But we wanted to work for the Lord; we didn’t let that stop us.”

Though by the turn of the 20th century a handful of white religious orders had begun to include the nation’s Native American and African-American populations in their pastoral mission _ most notably the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Pennsylvania _ religious orders for women of color shared more than a religious bond with the communities they served, said Sister Jamie T. Phelps, a theology professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

“These women had the same racial and cultural experiences as the people whom they were serving _ this was the first time people of color saw that happening,” said Phelps, who became the first black woman to join the Adrian Dominicans in 1959. “The women were proving that intelligent women and men of color could be ministers in the church, not just recipients of the church’s charity.”

Establishing dozens of missions around the nation, the nuns devoted themselves to tending to the spiritual and physical needs of children, the elderly and the sick _ sometimes resorting to begging themselves to garner clothing and medicine and other needed items.

“They served the community in every capacity you can think of,” said Phelps. “They took care of the poor and the sick, they took in the elderly, they helped economically _ they did it all.”

Education was a main focal point of the women’s missions. The Franciscan Handmaids operated schools in Harlem, where they moved their headquarters in 1922, while the Holy Family did the same in Los Angeles and across Louisiana. More than a half-dozen elementary schools from Kansas to South Carolina were founded by the Sisters of Providence.

A high school the order founded in 1828 _ St. Francis Academy, the nation’s first high school for black Catholic students _ remains open to this day.

“The sisters not only taught the faith, they taught basic skills like reading, writing and math,” said Jacqueline Wilson, director of the Office of Black Catholics for the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. “And many of the sisters were immigrants from Haiti and other Caribbean countries, so they spoke French and taught the children how to speak French too.”

Oftentimes black religious orders were the only route to Catholic education for black children, said Clarke, who attended Catholic schools herself.

“We filled a real need that the community had,” said Clarke. “There were not a lot of black Catholics in the beginning, so people turned to us if they wanted a Catholic education. Had it not been for the Oblates, in certain areas many black children would never have learned about Catholicism _ they weren’t allowed to go the white Catholic schools.”

On the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Marty, S.D., the grade school and high school operated by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament educated nearly all of the reservation’s school-aged children, said Sister Anthony Davis, one of the women who established the order.

“We educated all of the kids from the reservation and other ones from all over the United States,” said Davis. “We had more than 400 students in our schools.”

The women were just as successful overseas. Though the Franciscan Handmaids and Blessed Sacrament sisters concentrated their mission work within the United States, Holy Family and the Sisters of Providence took their efforts abroad. In 1917, the Sisters of Providence opened the first of five missions in Cuba. Though those closed in 1960, three other missions in Costa Rica remain in operation. Holy Family opened its own mission in Belize more than 100 years ago.

“These women really took the Catholic message to heart, that you just don’t talk about being Catholic but you go out there and you live it by helping people wherever you can,” said Hilbert Stanley, executive director of the National Black Catholic Congress. “That effort is a real tribute to the strength of their faith.”

People of color were not the only ones to benefit from the nuns’ generosity.

“We helped people of all races,” said Sister Maria Goretti Mannix, Mother Superior of the Franciscan Handmaids in New York. “Harlem wasn’t always predominantly black, so for a while many whites came to the convent for help, especially during the Depression. We had just as many white men as black men in our soup kitchen.”

Nuns of different races were welcomed into all four orders as well. For the past several years, Clarke pointed out, a white woman has served as principal of the Oblate Sisters’ St. Frances Academy.

“We’ve never shut our doors to anybody,” she said.

Despite their successes, the women still fought racism and prejudice on the homefront, often facing public ridicule and barred from using buildings as schools.

“People even made a great fuss about whether (Sisters of Providence) could even wear a religious habit,” said Phelps. “The idea of black women in habits rubbed the moral assumptions of many people the wrong way.”

Nuns today take strength from the stories of the obstacles their predecessors braved.

“These women were incredibly strong and brave,” said Sister M. Virginie Fish, who still remembers the sting of rejection she felt as an aspiring nun when told she could not join the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Pennsylvania because they did not accept black women. Today she helps lead the campaign for the canonization of the founder of the Sisters of Providence. “Everywhere they went doors were shut in their faces, but they were strong and did not let anything stop them. That is their legacy to us, that we must always persevere.”

Clarke agreed.

“These women are responsible for bringing so many black and Native American Catholics and even white Catholics to the faith,” she said. “They left their definitely left their mark. We owe so much to their perseverance.”

DEA END DANCY