Mary Elizabeth Lange

Contents

Mary Elizabeth Lange was a Cuban-born Black Catholic educator and foundress in Baltimore who established the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first enduring Catholic congregation founded for women religious of African descent in the United States.[1]

Mary Elizabeth Lange, OSP (born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange; c. 1789 – February 3, 1882) was an American religious sister in Baltimore, Maryland who founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in 1829, the first African-American religious congregation in the United States. She was also, via the Oblates, the first African-American superior general.

The cause for her beatification was opened in 1991. Pope Francis named her as venerable on June 22, 2023.

Life

Origins and formation

Elizabeth Clarisse Lange was born in Santiago de Cuba to a family of African descent and received an education unusual for women in her era. Surviving evidence does not establish the often-repeated claim that she was born in Haiti, and the range assigned to her birth year remains approximate. After leaving Cuba she lived briefly elsewhere in the Caribbean and arrived in Baltimore by the early nineteenth century, joining a substantial French-speaking Black Catholic community.

Vocation and service

Lange used her own home and resources to educate Black children who were excluded from most schools. With Marie Magdelaine Balas and the Sulpician priest James Joubert, she opened a school in 1828 and founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in 1829, taking the religious name Mary. The sisters professed vows, taught girls, sheltered orphans, cared for people during epidemics, assisted formerly enslaved people, and persevered despite poverty and opposition grounded in race and sex.

Early life

Lange was born in Saint-Domingue about 1789. It is said that her mother, Annette Lange, was the daughter of a Jewish plantation owner and an enslaved African woman. Her father, Clovis, was said to be an enslaved mulatto man on the same plantation.

During the Haitian Revolution, her parents escaped and took the family to Cuba, settling in Santiago de Cuba. There Lange received an excellent education. She left Cuba in the early 1800s and immigrated to the United States.

According to oral tradition of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Lange landed in Charleston, South Carolina. She traveled next to Norfolk, Virginia, and finally settled in Baltimore, Maryland by 1813. Baltimore had a large population of free people of color, who already outnumbered the city's enslaved population. Among the free people were numerous French-speaking Afro-Caribbean people who had also fled the revolution in Haiti.[4]

In the early 1800s, various Protestant organizations in Baltimore, such as Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church's Free African School (1802), Daniel Coker's Bethel Charity School (c. 1812), St. James Protestant Episcopal Day School (1824), and William Lively's Union Seminary (1825), created schools for African-American students. While providing a valuable service, they could not meet the demands of Baltimore's growing free African-American population.

Lange recognized the need for education for African-American children and opened a school for them in her home in the Fells Point area of the city in 1818.[4][5] Public education was not established for Black children in the city until 1866.

Foundress

In Baltimore, Lange met James Nicholas Joubert, a Sulpician priest who was a native of France and a former soldier. Joubert had also fled the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue. He was in charge of teaching catechism to the African-American children who attended the Lower Chapel at Saint Mary's Seminary. He found they had difficulty learning the catechism because they could not read very well, and thought it would be good to start a school for girls.[6]

After getting permission from the archbishop, he began looking for two women of color to serve as teachers. A friend suggested Lange and Marie Balas, since they were already operating a school in their home, which later became Saint Frances Academy. It is still operating in Baltimore.[6]

Joubert also wanted to start a women's religious congregation to teach African-American children. He asked Lange and Balas if they would do so. They said they had felt called to consecrate their lives to God and had been waiting to be shown the way to serve. Joubert agreed to support the women and persuaded Archbishop James Whitfield to approve the new community. The Oblate Sisters of Providence were founded by Lange and Joubert as the first religious congregation of women of African descent in the United States. The order was established with the primary purpose of Catholic education for girls.

On July 2, 1829, Lange and three other women (Balas, Mary Rosine Boegues, and an older student, Almeide Theresa Duchemin) took their first vows.[7]

Lange took the name of "Sister Mary" and was appointed as the first superior general of the new community. The sisters adopted a religious habit of a black dress and cape with a white cap. They started in a rented house with four sisters and twenty students. While dealing with poverty, racism, and hardships, the Oblate Sisters sought to evangelize the Black community through Catholic education. In addition to schools, the sisters later conducted night classes for women, vocational and career training, and established homes for widows and orphans.

By 1832, the community had grown to eleven members. That year a cholera outbreak hit the city. While the community as a whole volunteered to risk their lives in nursing the epidemic's victims, only four were chosen, Lange and three companions.[8]

Sister Frances died in the mid-1840s. Lange took her place working as a domestic at St. Mary's Seminary in the city to help support her community. In 1850 she was also appointed to serve the congregation as Mistress of novices, a position in which she served for the next ten years.[9]

Lange died on February 3, 1882, and was buried in the Cathedral Cemetery. Her remains were transferred to New Cathedral Cemetery on February 6, 1882.

Christian witness

Mother Lange understood education as a work of faith, intellectual dignity, and ecclesial belonging. She did not wait for prejudice to disappear before building institutions in the Catholic Church; she made religious life itself a field in which Black women exercised consecrated agency and leadership. Her humility included acceptance of changing community offices, not withdrawal from responsibility or silence about injustice.[2]

Her biography requires care because devotional retellings sometimes fill archival gaps with confident detail. The cause's judgment concerns the heroic practice of faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance shown in the evidence. It does not resolve every historical uncertainty. Her achievement is substantial without invented ancestry, exact birth dates, alleged quotations, or anachronistic descriptions of nineteenth-century institutions.

Ecclesial recognition

Cause and present status

The Archdiocese of Baltimore opened Lange's cause in 1991 and gathered historical documentation concerning her life, virtues, and reputation for holiness. On 22 June 2023 Pope Francis authorized the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the decree recognizing her heroic virtues. That decree gives her the title Venerable. No miracle has yet been approved for beatification, so she must not be styled Blessed or Saint.[3]

Liturgical and devotional scope

The decree of heroic virtues does not authorize or create public liturgical cult, an annual feast, or veneration proper to a Blessed. Catholics may privately ask Venerable Mary Lange's intercession and may visit places associated with her while the cause continues. Historical commemoration of her schools and congregation is also legitimate, but neither civic honors nor institutional celebrations alter the canonical boundary before beatification.

Legacy

Lange's legacy of the Oblate Sisters of Providence has thrived over the years in the United States and in several foreign countries.

Lange was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1991 for the St. Frances Academy which she founded.[10]

In 2005, three Baltimore parochial schools (St. Dominic School, Shrine of the Little Flower, and St. Anthony of Padua) were combined into Mother Mary Lange Catholic School. This was the first school named after her in the United States. It has since closed.

In 2008, the community celebrated the 180th anniversary of St. Frances Academy.

In August 2021, a new Mother Mary Lange Catholic School was opened; it was first new Catholic school in Baltimore in nearly six decades. Alisha Jordan was the founding principal.[11]

A three-part Spanish-language documentary, Hermanas de Corazon (2021), created by Gloria Rolando, was made about Lange and the Oblates' work in Cuba.[12]

Veneration

After Lange's death, many Catholics in Baltimore began to venerate her as a saint.

In 1991, with the approval of the Holy See, Cardinal William Henry Keeler, Archbishop of Baltimore, officially opened a formal investigation of Lange's life to study it for her possible canonization. She was titled Servant of God, and her remains were exhumed and examined.

In 2004, documents describing Lange's life were sent to the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

On May 28, 2013, Lange's remains were exhumed and transferred to the Baltimore community of the Oblate Sisters, where she was reinterred in their chapel.[13]

In 2023, the Vatican approved the positio (the documentation of Lange's life), a key step in the process toward being declared "Venerable" by the Church, and possibly canonizing Lange.[14] Lange was declared venerable by Pope Francis on June 22, 2023.[15] The postulator of the cause is Waldery Hilgeman.

References

  1. 1.Mother Mary Lange and the Oblate Sisters of Providence — Archdiocese of Baltimore account of the foundress's local ministry and the history of her cause
  2. 2.Venerable Mother Mary Lange — United States Conference of Catholic Bishops profile of her education, foundation, service, and present status
  3. 3.Decree recognizing Mary Lange's heroic virtues — Holy See bulletin recording Pope Francis's authorization of the 22 June 2023 decree and official biographical identifiers
  4. 4.[4.2]"Mary Elizabeth Lange", Maryland Women's Hall of Fame
  5. 5."Mother Lange". www.motherlange.org. Retrieved 2025-05-26.
  6. 6.[6.2]"Father James Joubert, SS". St. Francis Academy, Baltimore. 29 March 2023. Retrieved 12 April 2023.
  7. 7."The Cause of Canonization: Mother Mary Lange". Mother Lange Guild. Retrieved 12 April 2023.
  8. 8.Favors, Therese Wilson (October 18, 2012). "Keeping Watch". The Catholic Review. Archived from the original on 2017-02-25.
  9. 9."About Mother Lange". Mother Lange Guild.
  10. 10.Stegmana, Carolyn B. (2002). Women of Achievement in Maryland History. Maryland: Women of Achievement. p. 71. ISBN 0972436200.
  11. 11.GovPics, Maryland (2021-08-06), Mother Mary Lange Catholic School Grand Opening, retrieved 2021-09-13
  12. 12."Estrenarán documental "Hermanas de Corazón", de Gloria Rolando". Agencia Cubana de Noticias (in European Spanish). 2023-05-11. Archived from the original on 2023-05-31. Retrieved 2023-05-31.
  13. 13."Mother Mary Lange's remains transferred to her congregation's mother church in Catonsville". tribunedigital-baltimoresun. Retrieved 2017-12-24.
  14. 14.Liptak, Matthew (9 March 2023). "Vatican accepts 'positio' in Mother Lange's cause; Dicastery to review documents on her life". Global Sisters Report. Retrieved 12 April 2023.
  15. 15.Brockhaus, Hannah (June 22, 2023). "Mother Mary Lange, founder of first African-American religious congregation, declared venerable". Catholic News Agency. Retrieved 2024-02-09.