Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860

Abstract

Persons of Color and Religious at Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860. By Diane Batts Morrow. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 336. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.)As black people, as women, as Roman Catholics, [and] as a religious community, Diane Batts Morrow convincingly demonstrates in Persons of Color and Religious at Same Time, the Oblate Sisters formed antithesis of white, male, Protestant family patriarch who typified empowered citizen in nineteenth-century American (158). Morrow's work is not an institutional history as such, but a rich narrative that locates Oblate sisters within a larger southern antebellum context and carefully focuses on race as defining characteristic (2) of Oblate existence. Furthermore, Morrow examines how order survived, thrived, and flourished in antebellum society by forming unbreakable spiritual and social ties through what Rosalyn Terborg-Penn calls female networks (3). Morrow's sociocultural approach includes biographical synopses of leading Oblate sisters and sharp analysis of internal, external, institutional, ethnic, and religious vicissitudes that shaped Oblate life (2).The opening chapters of Persons of Color and Religious at Same Time examine foundations of Oblate sisterhood. James Joubert, along with Elizabeth Lange and Marie Balas, formally established Oblate sisterhood in 1828. Morrow convincingly points out that keen spiritual and devotional vision by Lange and Balas was realized as Oblate women religious achieved vibrant agency at a time when womenespecially free black women-experienced profound discrimination. Morrow fashions moving social and personal accounts of founding sisters and shows that unique charisma exhibited by women religious through humility resulted in determined self-empowerment (35).The formative decades of Oblate sisterhood, focus of chapters three through six, were upheld with fervent prayer and supported financially by dowries, sewing, boarding, and-most importantly-teaching. Similarly, Morrow insightfully contends, within nexus of black Christianity (Roman Catholic and Protestant) in nineteenth-century Baltimore, black laity provided spiritual, physical, and monetary support, for Oblate educational initiative and spiritual vision, even when hammer of racism struck hard. Such aid, in turn, helped Oblates achieve institutional and internal agency. …

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