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24763: HaitiFactsCheck (pub) Church seeking sainthood for Haitian nun



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*Church seeking sainthood for Haitian nun*
*

*By Foster Klug
*ASSOCIATED PRESS*
**

BALTIMORE -- In an era of slavery, a Haitian immigrant called Mother Mary Lange led the country's first community of black nuns, gracefully matching wits with a slave-owning priest and dodging insults from racist neighbors. Mother Lange also established the country's oldest continuing Catholic school for black children more than 30 years before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the United States. Today, the Archdiocese of Baltimore seeks to formally recognize Mother Lange's work and make her the first black U.S. saint -- a role many believe she has served in all but name since her death in 1882. "She has been a saint in the eyes of many people for a long time," said Sister Julia Apolonio, an Oblate nun who said that four years of daily prayer to Mother Lange helped her walk again without pain after her body was twisted and broken by lupus and repeated surgeries. "She does answer the prayers of the people who pray to her." In December, 2,000 pages of painstakingly compiled documentation formally were sent to the Vatican for review. It was the culmination of a 14-year effort that occasionally resembled a densely plotted mystery novel, with intrepid priests and nuns plowing through crumbling archives in Baltimore, Cuba and Haiti. "It is a relief, but we know it's not finished," said the Rev. John Bowen, 80, a Sulpician priest from Baltimore who is leading the effort to canonize Mother Lange. Within nine months, the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints is expected to determine whether Mother Lange's case is worthy of consideration. If it does, and if proof of a miracle is then found, the church would beatify her. With evidence of a second miracle, she would be named a saint. Frustrated researchers often were stumped by language barriers and documents rendered missing or incomplete because of the revolutions that convulsed the Caribbean at the end of the 18th century, when Mother Lange was born in either Haiti or Cuba. The picture of Mother Lange that emerges, though incomplete, stands in contrast to the oppressive lives of other black women living at the time south of the Mason-Dixon Line -- the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania and, before and during the Civil War, the boundary between the slave states and the free states. "What striking things she did," said Cardinal William Keeler, the archbishop of Baltimore. "It must have taken great courage and holiness." She was born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange about 1784. After she fled the violence of the Haitian slave revolt in about 1812, she settled in Baltimore, one of the East Coast port cities that Haitian refugees flocked to during the period. Mother Lange began teaching black children in her home, using her own money. In 1828, she founded St. Frances Academy with the help of the Rev. James Joubert, a French Sulpician priest who supported the education of black people. Several congregations rejected her attempts to become a nun, so Joubert helped Mother Lange and three other women take their vows in 1829 and start the Oblate Sisters of Providence, which now has about 100 members. Life for the community of nuns was hard. They suffered insults because they wore habits and crosses, which some white Catholics considered offensive. After Mother Lange and three other nuns nursed victims of Baltimore's 1832 cholera epidemic, city officials neglected to mention their service when honoring others. In 1835, the women were asked to do domestic work at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore. Before she agreed to do the job, Mother Lange sent a letter to the head of the seminary asking that he not "miss the respect which is due to the state we have embraced and the holy habit which we have the honor to wear." It was an extraordinary letter, in that Mother Lange, a black woman, was writing to a white priest with slave holdings, Mr. Bowen said. "She was willing to risk a lot."
   No black person in the United States has been named a saint.