Religious Pioneers: Building the Faith in the Archdiocese of New Orleans (review)

Archivists Dorothy Dawes and Charles Nolan have made a valuable contribution to Southern Catholic history in their co-edited work Religious Pioneers. A collaborative effort of the religious community archivists of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Pioneers chronicles, through biographical essays, over two-dozen Catholic religious orders' and congregations' efforts to establish, develop, and maintain the faith in Louisiana.

Organized chronologically into four sections, Pioneers begins with the founding of New Orleans through the antebellum period (1718-1860), followed by Civil War, Reconstruction and Yellow Fever (1861-1888), then focuses on late nineteenth/early twentieth-century developments (1888-1916), and concludes with the modern twentieth century and the Second Vatican Council (1917-1997). Dawes and Nolan could have just as easily arranged their material into four broad categories: educators, caregivers, visionaries, and spiritual models, for their work highlights these major areas.

The strength of this work is the contextualization of each religious order's or congregation's apostolic work in Catholic New Orleans through biographical sketches. This approach to Catholic social history gives the reader an understanding of the people, the times, and the contribution made to Catholic education, health care, and pastoral work. One cannot but be impressed by the grit, determination, and will power these religious women and men exemplified in spreading and maintaining the faith. No mere secular or temporal motivation impelled the Ursulines to brave the Atlantic to labor in the newly-established city on the Mississippi in the eighteenth century, the Sisters of Mercy to minister at their own peril to yellow-fever patients in the mid-nineteenth century, or the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to educate African Americans in the Jim Crow era of the twentieth century.

Nolan and Virginia Meacham Gould's portrait of Henriette Delille is particularly compelling. Delille, a "free person of color," that is, a descendant of a European-African liaison, founded a religious congregation of women, the Sisters of the Holy Family, in New Orleans before the Civil War. This was only the second time black women in the United States had established a religious community. The account of Delille and her congregation raises important issues of race, gender, and class, thus providing a direction for further consideration of these topics.

Mary H. Muldrey's essay on Mary Austin Carroll, R.S.M., "The Irish Channel Nun," frames her story in the context of the socio-economic, ethnic, gender, and racial dynamics of Catholic New Orleans in the nineteenth century and the implications of these for the twentieth century. As Muldrey notes, the crowded Irish Channel neighborhood had three national churches within blocks, if not yards, of each other. In time, religious structures changed as New Orleans Catholics eventually reconciled their ethnic differences. The Church's role in resolving these conflicts calls for additional study.

The essays on Catholic educators are truly social histories. Behind the brick and mortar of such venerable New Orleans educational institutions as Brother Martin High School, Mt. Carmel Academy, Xavier University, and Cabrini High School, one finds determined, organized, and astute religious men and women whose business acumen and religious zeal rivaled those of any corporate enterprise. By educating thousands of Catholics and non-Catholics, black and white, over the past three centuries, these schools have made a vital and lasting contribution to the city and the region.

This volume is an incentive for researchers to dig more deeply into the vast archival resources, hitherto largely unexploited, available on the history of Roman Catholicism in the American South, a topic still neglected in comparison to the attention devoted to other regions. Perhaps Dawes's and Nolan's next volume will focus on the Catholic laymen and laywomen these religious pioneers served so selflessly.