The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize by Edward T. Brett (review)

The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family were the first African American Catholic religious congregation to serve as missionaries. They played a defining role among Belize’s Garifuna population for nearly a century by directing schools, developing pastoral programs, and assisting the elderly. The sisters’ successes came even as they confronted racism, gender inequities, and poverty in the United States and in their Belize mission.

Edward T. Brett engages extensive archival research, interviews with Holy Family sisters, and testimony by Garifuna community members to provide a compelling and comprehensive overview of the contributions of this pioneering group of women religious. He expertly contextualizes the work in the understudied history of African American Catholicism, U.S. mission history, and the history of women religious.

The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family is chronologically organized in two parts with the first devoted to examining the pre–Second Vatican Council history and the second to examining the period following the Council. The congregation developed in the racially segregated context of Civil War-era New Orleans and the particular experience of relatively privileged free women of color. The racism of the place and time made formal Catholic Church recognition of the religious order so challenging that the history of the congregation’s foundation remains ambiguous.

It is clear, however, that in 1897 Bishop Salvatore Di Pietro, a Sicilian Jesuit, invited the Holy Family Congregation to take charge of a school for Garifuna children in Stann Creek, British Honduras. Despite (or because of) the challenges of poverty and racism that the Holy Family sisters confronted in the United States, they accepted the invitation to serve a population considered marginal in this British colony. With so little knowledge of their mission field that the sisters were surprised to learn that their Garifuna pupils did not speak English—and with nothing more than a contract with the bishop guaranteeing payment of their passage, $60 a month teaching salary, and a furnished house—four sisters departed for Belize in 1898.

During close to a century of mission that spanned British Honduras’s transformation from a colony to the nation of independent Belize, the sisters directed three primary schools, a high school, an education program for children who could not gain admission to the national high school, programs for the elderly, catechetical programs, and a lay association. Brett suggests that a shared African-descendent background granted the Holy Family sisters greater opportunities for cultural engagement with the Garifuna population than those enjoyed by white nuns: “. . . [The] black racial identity [of the Holy Family sisters], which caused them to suffer discrimination in the United States, turned into an advantage in British Honduras” (p. 32). As Brett documents, however, this shared identity did not eliminate challenges within the Holy Family Congregation, where lighter-skinned African American sisters dominated positions of authority, and Garifuna sisters struggled at times to assert a cultural presence.

Among the most compelling contributions of the book are the testimonies of the women religious, their former students, and their lay associates. These accounts reveal that the richness of mission history rests as much with the joy and challenge of creating shared communities as it does with the concrete accomplishments denoted by students educated, teachers formed, and vows taken. This is, in short, an important contribution to Catholic history that establishes the crucial role played by an African-descendent congregation in mission history.