"Henriette Delille & the Sisters of the Holy Family.(1813-1862)

Henriette the founder of the Roman Catholic Sisters of the Holy

Family,was born a free Creole of color in New Orleans.She was the youngest of three natural children of Jean Baptiste Delille-Sarpy,a white Creole,and his placee,or mistress,Marie Joseph "Pouponne"Dias,a free woman of color.Henriette African-American relatives were Creole,that is Roman Catholic and French-speaking ex-colonials,and some owned large agricultural properties.She was too young to remember it,she always boasted that several of her free African American uncles and cousins,including the celebrated swordsman Basile Crocker,served in the Battle of New Orleans.Her uncles Narcisse Labeau and Raphael Roig owned the plantations flanking that of white philanthropist John McDnogh,whose bequest built most of the pre-World War I public schools of New Orleans.The three were good friends.In addition to having prominent white friends,Henriette and other members of her family were themselves so fair skinned as to be mistaken for white on census records.She appears to have been reared for placage,or for being the kept woman of a wealthy man.She studied music,dance,and French literature and was encouraged to cultivate every charm and accomplishment with which to attract a well-to-do white patron.Her mother also instructed her in nursing and in the preparation of folks remedies from local roots and herbs.When Dellie was about eleven and her sister Cecilia was seventeen,something happened to turn the little girl away from the path ordained by her family.Cecilia had met and formed a liaison with a wealthy Austrian-born commission merchant at a public ball-white men often sought African American partners at these glittering parties for pay.At the same time,Delillie met Sister Saint Marthe Frontier,a French nun.The only member of the French religious order of the Dames Hospitalier then living in New Orleans,Sister Saint Marthe bought a lot on Barracks Street in 1823 and,with the financial assistance of the free people of color,opened a school for young girls of that class.The little school became a nucleus for Catholic missionary activities among African Americans slave as well as free.Having more to do than she could handle Sister Saint Marthe instructed her free African American students to teach religion to those slaves whose masters permitted it.By that time Deille was about fourteen,she had entered wholeheartedly into the work,soon becoming actively engage in visiting and nursing the sick and aged,feeding indigent people,and praying.In 1826 Sister Saint Marthe began an effort to establish a branch of her order dedicated to apostolic work among the African Americans of New Orleans.She had two young women in training,one white and the other,Juliette Guadin, a free woman of color.Juliette was the Cuban-born natural daughter of Marie Therese Saint La Cardonie,also free,and Pierre Guadin,a white creole.Her family moved to New Orleans when she was only nine.Julitte became a close friend of Nenriette Delille.After about a year,the fledgling religious community,perhaps because of white opposition to its interracialism,failed.Henriette Delille & Juliette retained their interest in the religious life.During the 1830's Henriette continuing deep involvement in work of charity to the poor of her race must have become troubling to the family.Henriette refused to go to the balls,exclaming that "one hour with god in church is sweeter than the vanities found in the ballroom"she offered her older relatives by condeming their lifestyles,with its extramarital alliances,as sinful.Her mother,Pouponne Dias,became even more worried about Henriette future.Without the economic security of a wealthy protector,what was her daughter to do for a living?Henriette wanted only to be a nun and minister to the poor.Finally in desperation,her mother encouraged her to enter a conventin France.There,Henriette could escape the deprivation and discrimation that,Pouponne felt,must come to anyone seeking to work among the bondsmen and the poorest of New Orleans.Henriette refused to leave there.Her focus remained entirely local.Then,in 1832,Pouponne Dias had a nervous breakdown.Her affairs and those of her minor daughter were turned over to the courts.It was not until 1835,when she declared of legal age,that Henriette was able to sell her property.She and Juliette Guadin had become close friends with Marie Jeanne Aliquot,a French-born woman twice their age.Jeanne was one of three blood sisters who moved to New Orleans to work in Catholic missions.One of Jeanne's sisters became an Ursuline nun in 1828,and in 1831 the other sister joined the staff of the Barracks Street school founded by Sister Saint Marthe.The Day Marie Jeanne Aliquot arrived in the Crescent City in 1832,she was rescued by an African American man after having fallen into the Mississippi River.From that time forward she dedicated herself to working with African Americans.In 1834 she took over the leadership of the girls' school established by Sister Saint Marthe.In 1836 she attempted to establish the sisters of the presentation,a religious community,with Henriette Delille,Juliette Gaudin,Josephine Charles,and six other young Creole women of color.To the people who saw her ethhusiastically teaching the word of god to the slaves and anyone who would listen to her along the streets,Marie Jeanne Aliquot seemed eccentric,and many laughed at her.Both the local Catholic hierarchy and the civil government responded unfavorably to her new order because its membership was interracial.The experiment was soon squelched.At a time when males totally dominated Catholic and most other Christian missionary organizations,what the proposed community needed was a male clerical patron.This is found in the person of Father Etienne Jean Francois Rousselon,a French priest who arrived in New Orleans in 1837.By that time,the growing English-speaking Protestant American population was becoming more influential.City & state officials,often reflecting the influence of American race relations,were incensed by reports of Catholic missionary activity among African Americans,which they feared would lead to discontent among the free African American population and insubordination among slaves.Etienne advised Jeanne to concentrate her missionary activities,at least for a while,among African Americans on the rural plantations,where invited,instead of in the city.The rural plantation country of southern Louisiana was still mostly Creole.He also became pastor designate of Saint Augustine's,new church under construction in the Treme neighborhood,a Creole suburd of New Orleans with a large free African American population.He secured from his superior,Bishop Antonie Blanc,permission to find a society of free African American women-no white member would be included-under Henriiette Delille's leadership.When the church was finished in 1842,the group, quietly and unofficially,became a reality.At first only three members,Henriette Delille, Juliette Gaudin,and Josephine Charles,were left from the original group along with Jeanne,who lived as a member,abeit secretly,for the rest of her life.Father Rousselon had originally planned for what came to be called the Sisters of the Holy Family to be a contemplative or cloistered order.Long before they formed their society,Henriette and the others,already had become engaged in charitable work.In a city where African Americans were either enslaved or circumscribed in their freedom,the Catholic church continued to emphasize that the order of existed for the purpose of teaching religion.the New Orleans community of free Creoles of color was determined not to allow this to be the only goal.In 1847,when the state legislature passed an act requiring incorporation of nonprofit societies,a lay Associations of the Holy Family was formed for the support of the sisters.Under the leadership of francois Lacroix,a prosperous free African American tailor and brother of the wholesale grocer Julien Lacroix,wealthiest African American person in the city,the association built a hospice on Saint Bernard Street in 1849 for Henriette and the others to care for the sick,aged, and poor.In 1850,Henriette opened the group's first convent and school for free African American girls on Bayou near Saint Augustine.These first few "sisters" were not allowed to wear religious garb in public,and when they were mentioned in the Catholic press,they were simply referred to as "a group of pious,colored females"As their field of activity widened,Rousselon determined that free African Americans women needed greater training to prepare to launch formally the Holy Family order.In 1852 Henriette made her novitiate at Saint Michael's a school for white girls in Saint James Parish,under the Madames of the Sacred Heart.Later that year,at Saint Augustine,she,Juliette Gaudin,and Josephine Charles made their final vows.Around the same time,the Incorporation Act was amended to annul all religious associations of people of color,but the city of New Orleans seems to have ignored the law as it related to the new sisters.This may have been in deference to Creole sensibilities.At the same time,under the same amended statute,Saint James,African Methodist Episcopal Church was shut down.Saint James,was unlike the Holy Family in that it was Protestant (that is,") and had no white supervision.In any case,in the 1850s the order was well and truly launched.During a decade of the city's notorious yellow fever,cholera, and malaria epidemics,the order's missions grew so much that the sisters had to open an annex to their hospice in 1860. Children orphaned in the epidemics were cared for in the new asylum on Dauphine Street. White & African American alike received nursing from the sisters during the epidemics. Deaths in one epidemics were so great and produced so many orphans that,for a while,children of both races had to be housed together in the sisters' care. The era of Civil War Reconstruction brought changes to the Sisters of the Holy Family.