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

Edward T. Brett selects a little-known foreign mission managed by a little-known congregation of Catholic religious women for The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize. Although the subject might appear narrow for monograph development, this publication is important for two reasons.

First, in the recent flourishing scholarship concerning American nuns and sisters, the role of women of color remains under-explored. While Anglo-European members dominated the nineteenth-century rise of American sisterhoods, women of color from diverse cultures made significant contributions to Catholic religious life. Often these achievements were ignored, if not deliberately expunged from convent records. Brett's study marks one step toward correcting this scholarly oversight. An account of sisters of color planting their ministry on soil outside the United States adds to the growing recognition of and appreciation for the innovative efforts, pedagogical stature, and spiritual agency of African American professed women.

Second, Brett centers on the practice of sending missionaries of one country to proselytize among the inhabitants of another, a rocky past that has left the Catholic Church with a conflicted legacy among some peoples. The Sisters of the Holy Family, as the first African American religious to preside at a foreign mission, added to the overall impact of across-culture conversion policies. On the one hand, Brett demonstrates, the sisters brought educational leadership, personal inspiration, and religious comfort to a community of desperately poor people. On the other, the Belize mission did not avoid cultural insensitivity, theological conflicts, and strained relationships. Despite honorable work, the Holy Family Sisters generated their share of disquieting episodes connected to spiritual and ethnic inclusivity, even as they negotiated daunting barriers heaped on them as religious women of color.

American racism is the rope twisting the Gordian knot of the Holy Family history. Organized amidst the convoluted world of antebellum New Orleans, the handful of sisters, led by Henriette Delille, a free woman of color, grappled with unrelenting religious and secular discrimination. Yet, racist social, legal, and political categories defining ancestry and color also permeated the congregation, tangling the fabric of the sisterhood (101-102, 181, n. 42). In 1898 those complications manifested themselves in Belize, where the sisters worked with the Garifuna, an indigent black community. The author asserts that the sisters and their charges quickly built a racial bond (47), but as late as 1978, the sisterhood endured a painful period that exposed deep resistance to the cultural identity of Garifuna women in the congregation.

Some of the writing could be more forceful. For example, it seems disingenuous to use "gentlemen" for wealthy white men who trolled the Quadroon Balls, assessing young girls of color as potential mistresses (16-17); "sexual predators" would be more precise. The research, however, is meticulous. Extensive interviews with and letters from the nuns authenticate the humanity in the Belize mission story. This narrative calls for additional work in the records of the Holy Family Sisters, whose voices must be more fully heard in American Catholic history.