The dissemination of Catholicism among freed African Americans in the Reconstruction-era Southern United States is an important, yet relatively overlooked, history. While Catholic education had already made its way to the US in the years before the Civil War, Catholicism among Black communities was still in its relative infancy.
Cardinal Herbert Vaughan––most known for his tenure as Archbishop of Westminster, England, and for founding Saint Joseph’s Missionary Society of Mill Hill––journeyed to and across the Southern United States in 1872. He aimed to document the hindrances that could and did threaten the introduction and widespread dissemination of Catholicism in African American communities throughout the once-Confederate territories.
In a journal he kept throughout this trip, Vaughan recorded conversations, stories, and interactions that discussed the South and their inhabitants. By examining the history of African American Catholicism before Reconstruction alongside Vaughan’s documentation, it becomes evident that the Mill Hill Missionaries aimed to both spread Catholicism to emancipated African Americans and revitalize––through providing additional priests for education and renovating or constructing buildings––a decimated South that continuously portrayed Catholicism as an insignificant religion because of its deteriorating institutions and organizations.
Source: newmanreview.org
