"...seven of the eight first orders of Catholic nuns established in the United States owned slaves by the 1820s.... an eighth order did as well, at least for a time."
"The Georgetown Visitation sisters owned at least 107 enslaved men, women and children, the records show. And they sold dozens of those people to pay debts and to help finance the expansion of their school and the construction of a new chapel."...“Nothing else to do than to dispose of the family of Negroes,’’ Mother Agnes Brent, the convent’s superior, wrote in 1821 as she approved the sale of a couple and their two young children. The enslaved woman was just days away from giving birth to her third child.
From a N.Y. Times article about orders of U.S. Catholic nuns
that bought and sold slaves.
I had read about orders of Catholic priests and brothers owning slaves, but nuns too?
How did these religious communities, with their daily prayers and meditations, manage to miss the moral wrongdoing of owning and selling people?
No comments:
Post a Comment