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In one of an institution’s greatest efforts to atone for slavery, a prominent order of Catholic priests promised to raise $ 100 million to benefit the descendants of the slaves it belonged to and to promote racial reconciliation initiatives in the United States.
The action of the leaders of the Jesuit priests’ conference represents the Roman Catholic Church’s greatest effort to repair the purchase, sale and slavery of the black people, church officials and historians said.
The promise comes at a time when claims for damages are echoing in Congress, on university campuses, in church cellars and city halls, as leaders struggle with the painful legacies of segregation and the national system of involuntary servitude.
“This is an opportunity for Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said Rev. Timothy P. Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference in Canada and the United States. “Our shameful history of possession of Jesuit slaves in the United States was taken from the dusty shelf and can never be put back.”
The money raised by the Jesuits will flow to a new foundation established in partnership with a group of descendants, who pushed for negotiations with the Jesuits after learning from a series of articles in The New York Times that their ancestors had been sold in 1838. a The order depended on slave labor and the sale of slaves for more than a century to support the clergy and help finance the construction and daily operations of churches and schools, including the country’s first Catholic institution of higher education, the college now known as Georgetown University.
Father Kesicki said his application had already deposited $ 15 million in a fund created to support the foundation, whose board will include representatives from other institutions with roots in slavery. The Jesuits also hired a national fund-raising company to raise the rest over the next three to five years, he said.
The pledge falls short of the $ 1 billion that the descendant leaders asked the Jesuits to raise. Father Kesicki and Joseph M. Stewart, the acting president of the newly created foundation, the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, said this remains a long-term goal as the organization moves to support institutions and initiatives focused on racial healing .
“Now we have a path that has never been taken before,” said Stewart, a retired corporate executive whose ancestors were sold in 1838 to help save Georgetown from financial ruin.
“They didn’t come running to us, but because we went to them with open arms and open hearts, they responded,” said Stewart of the Jesuits. “They embraced our vision.”
Approximately half of the foundation’s annual budget will be distributed as grants to organizations engaged in racial reconciliation projects, said Jesuit leaders and descendants. About a quarter of the budget will support educational opportunities for descendants in the form of scholarships and grants. A smaller portion will meet the emergency needs of elderly or infirm descendants.
Bishop Shelton J. Fabre, President of the United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, described the plan as the church’s “biggest financial commitment” to “heal the wounds” caused by its participation in slavery.
About 5,000 living descendants of the people enslaved by the Jesuits were identified by genealogists at the Georgetown Memory Project, a nonprofit group.
Craig Steven Wilder, an MIT historian who wrote about universities, the Catholic Church and slave ownership, described the change as an important first step. “This will put tremendous pressure on other institutions in the United States – universities and churches – that share this story,” said Wilder.
Religious institutions have been at the forefront of the growing reparations movement. In 2018, the Catholic sisters of the Sacred Heart nuns set up an indemnity fund to finance scholarships for African Americans in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, where the nuns had about 150 blacks.
The following year, Virginia Theological Seminary, which relied on slave labor, created a $ 1.7 million reparations fund, and Princeton Theological Seminary announced that it would spend $ 27 million on scholarships and other initiatives to repair its ties to slavery.
Several episcopal dioceses linked to slavery – including those in Maryland, New York and Texas – have also set up indemnity funds.
Georgetown, which was founded by the Jesuits, promised to raise about $ 400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of people enslaved by the order. The university, which sits on the board of the newly created foundation and contributed $ 1 million to get it off the ground, plans to distribute the first scholarships this year.
This is not the first time that the Jesuits have told their story. In the 1960s, Maryland’s Jesuits established the Carroll Fund for needy black students with the proceeds from the sale of a property that was part of one of their plantations. The fund provided between $ 15 million and $ 25 million in scholarships for black students in Jesuit schools, Jesuit officials said. But the fund’s money was also for unrelated purposes.
Some descendants fear that the new plan – which was drawn up over three years during a series of private meetings that included representatives from the Jesuits, Georgetown and three descendant leaders, Mr. Stewart, Cheryllyn Branche and Earl Williams Sr. – will also fall short, noting that the foundation was developed without the contribution of the broader descendant community.
Sandra Green Thomas, the founding president of the GU272 Descendants Association, called the Jesuits’ $ 100 million pledge “more than I ever thought we would see”.
“But my concern is whether or not this foundation will benefit descendants or those who are in control of the foundation,” she said, expressing concern about administrative costs, such as salaries and fundraising. “If the money is not intended for descendants, it is not at all reparative. We need more details. “
Richard J. Cellini, the founder of the Georgetown Memory Project, feared that the descendant leaders had agreed to an agreement prematurely, without “full accountability by the Maryland Jesuits of the income generated by nearly 150 years of slave ownership by the Jesuits”.
“We need to examine the balance sheets, both current and historical,” said Cellini. “Until we know the size of the wealth taken from these families, we cannot judge the adequacy of the remedy presented to them.”
The enslaved people were left out of the origin story traditionally told about the Catholic Church in the United States.
But in the early decades of the American republic, the church established its base in the South, relying on plantations and slave laborers for its survival and expansion, according to historians and archival documents.
The Jesuits believed that slaves had a soul, but they also saw blacks as goods to be bought and sold. At the time, the Catholic Church did not consider the possession of slaves to be immoral, according to Rev. Thomas R. Murphy, a historian at the University of Seattle.
Thus, the priests baptized the children of the slaves, blessed their marriages and demanded that their owners attend the mass, show the records of the Jesuits. But the records also document whipping, severe planting conditions, families torn apart by the sale of slaves, and difficulties experienced by people sent away from home while the church expanded.
Still, the decision to sell virtually all slaves belonging to Maryland’s Jesuits in the 1830s to raise money to save Georgetown and support the financially limited order left some priests deeply disturbed. Plantation life in the Deep South was notoriously brutal.
“Selling our slaves,” argued some Jesuits, “was the same as selling their souls.”
But Jesuit leaders prevailed, signing an agreement in 1838 to sell 272 men, women and children in one of the largest slave sales on record at the time.
Their story almost disappeared from public memory until 2015, when Georgetown President John J. DeGioia announced the creation of a slavery working group and convened a campus-wide discussion after the reopening of a building named after one of the first presidents involved in the sale of slaves.
After student protesters demanded that the names of presidents be removed from campus buildings, Cellini established the Georgetown Memory Project and hired a team of genealogists to identify and locate the descendants of people who had been sold.
Mr. Stewart, a devout Catholic, was one of them. “I had to process that this was done by the Catholic Church to my ancestors,” he said.
Then, said Stewart, he began to focus on the Jesuits, “looking for a way to hold them accountable.”
In May 2017, Mr. Stewart wrote to the Jesuit leadership in Rome on behalf of the GU272 Descendants Association, requesting formal negotiations.
A month later, Rev. Arturo Sosa, the superior general of the order, responded, describing Jesuit slavery as “a sin against God and a betrayal of the human dignity of his ancestors”.
Father Sosa called for a process of “dialogue” between Jesuits in the United States and their descendants.
In August of that year, Father Kesicki flew to Michigan to meet Mr. Stewart and his wife, Clara. He blessed your home. Then, the two men sat down for a conversation that would lay the groundwork for their negotiations.