How I became disillusioned with my Catholic high school
The Ursuline sisters held slaves and never told us about them.
I graduated from Ursuline Academy in Wilmington, Delaware in the spring of 2013. At graduation, I received the highest award the school offered, an award given to the young woman in the graduating class who most embodied the Ursuline spirit, which was exemplified by the school’s motto, Serviam, a traditional Latin phrase meaning, “I will serve.” The motto is the opposite of what Satan told God before he fell: non serviam.
For years, I proudly wore the gold cross I was given at my high school graduation until the chain broke a few years ago. After graduating from college, I had entered a convent myself, although not with the Ursuline sisters, and I proudly made sure that we used the prayers for the feast of St. Angela Merici each January 27, declaring it “St. Angela Day,” just as we had celebrated in my 9 years of Ursuline education.
I attribute who I am today in a large part to my Ursuline education. The leadership skills I gained, living the preferential option for the poor, and having a desire to spread the Gospel and build up the Church are some of my core values as an adult. I can confidently quote St. Angela Merici’s encouragement to “build community wherever you go,” a maxim that defined my time as a student and has been a helpful reminder as an adult living in our fractured society.
That is why I was so shocked two years ago when I was doing research for another project, now a Catholic writer and journalist, and I read what seemed to be a throwaway line in Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers’ book, Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism.
The deacon claimed that the Ursuline sisters in New Orleans were highly respected in the 18th century because they were among the largest slaveholders in the area.
Immediately I thought that couldn’t be true. An Ursuline sister had taught us a class on Ursuline history, and I knew all about the foundation in New Orleans. In the war of 1812, Andrew Jackson came to pray at the sisters’ convent, which has since become the National Shrine of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, a title for Mary frequently invoked during hurricane season.
Surely if slaves were involved, she would have told us, right?
I reached out to the sister who taught our class on Ursuline history and who had led several trips to Italy for alumnae to walk “in the steps of St. Angela,” the Italian foundress of the Ursuline sisters. I very plainly wrote out how I’d come across the information and asked her: Have the Ursuline sisters ever issued any sort of public acknowledgment or apology for the fact that they owned slaves in New Orleans?
My request was personal and informal at the time, as I was mostly trying to work out the cognitive dissonance of seeing the Ursuline sisters as social justice advocates of the highest magnitude along with this newfound information that they had held slaves. The sister never responded to my email.
About a year later, my alma mater posted about the Ursuline sisters, encouraging alumnae to make a financial gift in their honor. I remembered what I had read a year before and how I had not found a satisfactory answer, so I replied to the post on Facebook very simply asking whether or not the Ursuline sisters had ever publicly acknowledged or apologized for the fact that they were among the largest slaveholders at their New Orleans foundation.
A few women who had been my classmates reacted to the post with emojis or likes. The school didn’t respond, but a woman who was now retired former member of the school administrative staff replied, saying that she was sure the sisters had addressed the issue, knowing their staunch commitment to social justice.
I understood her inclination to think positively of the sisters and to assume that they had addressed this dark part of their history in the U.S. because that had been my original inclination as well. But the more I looked for evidence that they had acknowledged and disavowed this part of their past, the worse things seemed to get.
Last week, Ursuline Academy in Wilmington once again posted for their founder’s day fundraising campaign. Reminded that the idea of the sisters having slaves had been itching my conscience for two years, I once again formulated what I thought was a respectful, but pointed comment. It was deleted.
Now, I work in communications and I understand the knee-jerk reaction to get rid of anything that may harm the reputation of the organization. Realistically, it was not a sister who deleted my comment but a staff member. And yet, this is a microcosm of how many issues have historically been dealt with in the Church and continuing to pass responsibility off to someone else means that organizations and individuals never actually learn and grow.
Somewhere along the line, someone needs to step up and say that what happened is wrong. It does not negate all of the good things that the organization or the individual sisters have done, but it does place them in their proper context. A well-coordinate PR campaign is not what is needed here— returning to the Lord with prayer and fasting is what would be appropriate.
I didn’t want to write about the Ursulines and their slaveholdings, but after two years of having this on my conscience and a lack of response from the school and the sisters, now is the appropriate time to lay out exactly what the Ursuline sisters are seemingly trying to sweep under the rug:
In 1727, the Ursuline sisters were originally gifted eight slaves by Jesuit priest Ignace-Nicholas de Beaubois at their foundation in the United States to serve as domestic slaves. Almost immediately, two ran away.
In 1758, a young woman who wanted to enter the Ursuline convent brought two slaves with her as part of her entrance dowry.
By 1770, the Ursulines, a community of approximately 12 sisters, held at least 61 slaves on a plantation they owned, where they grew their own produce for themselves and their boarders.
By 1771, in addition to the slaves on the plantation, the sisters owned at least 17 slaves that worked in their convent as domestic servants.
The Ursuline sisters were among the top 30% of slaveowners in the region in 1731 and were in the top 6% of slaveholders by 1770.
In 1777, the Ursuline sisters sold one of their two plantations, including 35 of their slaves.
On multiple occasions, women who became pregnant out of wedlock or men who became addicted to alcohol were sold due to their moral defects.1
I reached out to some of my classmates, as well as a former teacher and alumnae of other Ursuline schools in the United States, whom I had met in high school when the various Ursuline schools came together for a lacrosse tournament. Every single one told me the same thing: “No, we never learned that.” A few added something along the lines of, “I definitely would have remembered that.”
Of course, the current Ursuline sisters did not own, buy, sell, or trade slaves. But they also haven’t said that the sisters who did were wrong, or been honest in describing that part of their history as sinful.
In fact, on the history page of Ursuline Academy in New Orleans, they proudly state that the sisters educated and catechized marginalized groups including indigenous and enslaved girls. That seems especially disingenuous when considering that at least some of the girls were enslaved by the sisters themselves.
Religious orders owning slaves is not unique to the Ursuline sisters. The Jesuits and Visitation sisters at Georgetown held hundreds of slaves and sold them against the directions of the Vatican in order to save and expand their secondary and higher education institutions.
The difference is that the Jesuits and Visitation sisters have addressed this issue publicly and offered $100 million in reparations to the descendants of the slaves they held and sold, making not only moral restitution for the reality that their success in America was built in part on the backs of slaves, but also financial restitution, recognizing that the effects of slavery remain today.
In a letter to her father, a young French woman in the process of becoming an Ursuline sister in New Orleans anticipated that he may have moral qualms about the fact that his daughter and her sisters in religion were slaveholders. The practice of slavery had since been abolished in France, but Marie Madeleine Hachard wrote to her father, “It is the custom of the country.”
Christians are not meant to simply follow local custom. In the lives of the saints, including St. Angela Merici, we find again and again times when society was drenched in sin and saints came along who spoke the Truth, the Truth of the Gospel and the inherent dignity of all human life. It’s because of this holy boldness that St. Paul transformed Corinth, St. Patrick brought the Gospel to Ireland, and Mother Teresa wiped the wounds of those dying in the slums of Calcutta.
The Ursuline sisters actually did break the custom of the time in many ways by educating enslaved and indigenous women, as well as by working to keep enslaved families together when they bought or sold human beings. This willingness to break custom in some ways but not to go so far as to actually free their slaves or not participate in the practice of slavery shows how the sisters’ own business prowess got in the way of the mission with which they had been entrusted by God.
In a 2016 document, the Ursuline Sisters of the Roman Union wrote, “Our world cries for reconciliation and peace... In our Ursuline educational communities, we can offer opportunities for dialogue and moments of reconciliation.”2
Acknowledging and disavowing their slaveholding past should be easy for the Ursuline sisters. None of them is personally responsible, and it is something so clearly wrong. Deleting comments and ignoring emails will not make it go away, nor should it.
I encourage the Ursuline sisters to own this part of their history. Put out a statement that can be referenced on all of your websites so that there can be no confusion about whether or not slavery and the racism that underpinned it was wrong. When you refer to the sisters educating slaves, be honest that they were slaveholders themselves. Make it clear that you have learned from this dark part of your past, adding a coda to your history pages that says that in the midst of all of the amazing Spirit-led initiatives the Sisters led, they also fell victim to the culture of the time and held slaves, a practice that was just as sinful in 1770 as it is today.
Now, there’s the question of what the rest of us should do. Do some reading. My main sources for this article were all relatively easy reads that I would recommend:
Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 by Emily Clark (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2007)
Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1720–1760, edited by Emily Clark (Louisiana State University Press, 2009)
The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns (Random House, 2023)
Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers (Ignatius Press, 2023)
If you are an Ursuline Academy student, parent, or alumna, make your voice heard. Reach out to the school and the sisters and let them know that you would like to see this addressed. Be respectful, but firm.
Most of all, never stop looking for ways to build the Kingdom of God, to question structures of power, and to choose the poor and vulnerable over what is easy or comfortable. After all, that’s what St. Angela would do.
Ursuline Academy in Wilmington, the Ursuline Eastern Province, and the Ursuline Central Province have not responded to requests for comment or clarification.
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The views expressed here belong to the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views of her employer.
Data comes from Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 by Emily Clark (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2007), Chapter 5.
“Ursuline Education in the Spirit of St. Angela” by the Ursulines of the Roman Union (2016).
Thank you for your insistence and dedication to truth-telling. I personally think St. Angela is proud of you.
This is a fantastic bit of Catholic journalism! I hope that the Sisters have the courage to respond. Another great book in this area is Fr Christopher Kellerman’s All Oppression Shall Cease, on slavery in global Catholic history. This is a difficult topic, but I fear we will continue to fail at evangelization until we reconcile with our past.