Mary Elizabeth Lange
| Elizabeth Clarisse Lange | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1794 Santiago de Cuba, Cuba |
| Died | 1882 Baltimore, Maryland |
Mary Lange, O.S.P. (1794-1882), was an African-American religious sister who was the foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, a religious congregation established to allow African-American women to enter religious life in the Catholic Church. The cause for her beatification has been started and thus she is honored as a Servant of God by the Catholic Church.
She was born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange. She was born in Santiago de Cuba, in a culturally French community about 1794. There she received an excellent education. She left Cuba in the early years of the 1800s and immigrated to the United States. Oblate oral tradition said she arrived first in Charleston, then traveled to Norfolk, and finally settled in Baltimore by 1813. Baltimore's free African-American population had already outnumbered the city's slave population and there was also a fair sized French speaking African Caribbean population who had early fled the revolution in Haiti.
In the early 1800s, various Protestant organizations in Baltimore, such as Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church’s Free African School (1802), Daniel Coker’s Bethel Charity School (c. 1812), St. James Protestant Episcopal Day School (1824), and William Lively’s Union Seminary (1825), created schools for African-American students. While providing a valuable service, they could not meet the demands of Baltimore’s growing free African-American population. Lange recognized the need for education for African American children and opened a school for them in her home in the Fells Point area of the city. There were no free public schools for children of color in Baltimore until 1866.
In Baltimore, Lange met a Sulpician priest, James Nicholas Joubert, S.S., who was a native of France and a former soldier. Joubert had also fled the rebellion in Haiti. He was in charge of teaching the African American children who attended the Lower Chapel at Saint Mary's Seminary their catechism. He found they could not read very well and thought it would be a good idea to start a school for girls. After getting permission from the Archbishop he began looking for two women of color to serve as teachers. A friend suggested Elizabeth Lange and Marie Balas since they were already operating a school in their home. He then decided it might be a good idea to start a women religious order at the same time to teach the children. He asked the women if they would agree to start a religious order. They shared with him that felt called to consecrate their lives to God and had been waiting for Him to show them a way to serve Him. Joubert agreed to support them and persuaded Archbishop James Whitfield to approve the new community. Thus the Oblate Sisters of Providence were founded by Lange and Joubert as the first religious congregation of women of African descent in the United States. The Oblate Sisters of Providence were established with the primary purpose of the Catholic education of girls.
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