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In one of the biggest efforts by an institution to atone for slavery, a prominent order of Catholic priests has pledged to raise $ 100 million for the benefit of the descendants of the enslaved people it once possessed and to promote initiatives of racial reconciliation across the United States.
The decision by the leaders of the Jesuit Priests’ Conference represents the Roman Catholic Church’s greatest effort to be forgiven for buying, selling and enslaving black people, Church officials and historians have said.
The engagement comes at a time when calls for redress are ringing through Congress, college campuses, church basements and town halls as leaders grapple with the painful legacies of segregation and the national system of involuntary servitude.
“This is an opportunity for the Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said Reverend Timothy P. Kesicki, president of the Conference of Jesuits of Canada and the United States. “Our shameful history of Jesuit slavery in America has been taken off the dusty shelf, and it can never be put back together.
The money raised by the Jesuits will go to a new foundation established in partnership with a group of descendants, who lobbied for negotiations with the Jesuits after learning from a series of articles in the New York Times that their ancestors had was sold in 1838. The order relied on slave labor and slave sales for over a century to support the clergy and to help finance the construction and day-to-day operations of churches and schools, including the country’s first Catholic institution of higher learning, the college now known as Georgetown University.
Father Kesicki said his order has already deposited $ 15 million in a trust established to support the foundation, whose board of directors will include representatives of other institutions with roots in slavery. The Jesuits also hired a national fundraising company with the aim of raising the remainder over the next three to five years, he said.
The pledge does not match the billion dollars that the descending leaders asked the Jesuits to raise. Father Kesicki and Joseph M. Stewart, interim chairman of the newly established Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, said this remains a long-term goal as the organization moves to support institutions and initiatives focused on racial healing.
“We now have a way forward that has never been traveled before,” said Mr. Stewart, a retired business executive whose ancestors were sold in 1838 to help save Georgetown from financial ruin.
“They did not come running towards us, but because we came to them with open arms and open hearts, they responded,” Mr. Stewart said of the Jesuits. “They adopted our vision.”
About half of the foundation’s annual budget will be distributed as grants to organizations engaged in racial reconciliation projects, Jesuit and descendant leaders said. 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 Conference of Catholic Bishops The Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism described the plan as the Church’s “greatest financial commitment” to “heal the wounds” caused by its participation in slavery.
About 5,000 living descendants of those enslaved by the Jesuits have been identified by genealogists at the Georgetown Memory Project, a nonprofit group.
Craig Steven Wilder, an MIT historian who has written on universities, the Catholic Church and slave keeping, described the move as an important initial step. “This will put enormous pressure on other institutions in the United States – universities and churches – that share this history,” Dr. Wilder said.
Faith-based institutions have been at the forefront of the growing reparations movement. In 2018, the Catholic Sisters of the Religious of the Sacred Heart created a reparation fund to fund scholarships for African Americans in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, where the nuns had approximately 150 blacks.
The following year, the Virginia Theological Seminary, which relied on bonded laborers, established a $ 1.7 million reparation fund and the Princeton Theological Seminary announced it would spend $ 27 million on scholarships and other initiatives to repair. its links with slavery.
Several episcopal dioceses related to slavery – including those in Maryland, New York and Texas – have also established reparation funds.
Georgetown, which was founded by the Jesuits, has pledged to raise around $ 400,000 a year for the benefit of descendants of people enslaved by the order. The university, which sits on the board of the newly formed foundation and contributed $ 1 million to get it off the ground, plans to hand out the first grants this year.
This is not the first time that the Jesuits have taken their history into account. In the 1960s, the Jesuits of Maryland created the Carroll Fund for Black Students in Need 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 also went for independent purposes.
Some descendants fear that the new plan – which was developed over three years in a series of private meetings that included representatives of the Jesuits, Georgetown and three descendant leaders, Mr. Stewart, Cheryllyn Branche and Earl Williams Sr – will not be respected either. , noting that the foundation was developed without input from the wider descendants community.
Sandra Green Thomas, the founding president of the GU272 Descendants Association, called the Jesuits’ $ 100 million commitment “more than I ever thought we would see.”
“But my concern is whether or not this foundation will benefit the descendants or those who control the foundation,” she said, expressing concern about administrative costs, such as salaries and fundraising. “If the money isn’t for the descendants, then it’s really not remedial. We need more details. “
Richard J. Cellini, founder of the Georgetown Memory Project, feared that the descendant leaders had accepted a deal prematurely, without “a full account from the Jesuits of Maryland of the proceeds generated by nearly 150 years of Jesuit slavery.”
“We need to look at the balance sheets, current and historical,” Cellini said. “Until we know the size of the wealth taken from these families, we cannot judge the desirability of the remedy presented to them.”
Slaves have been largely excluded from the origin story traditionally told of the Catholic Church in the United States.
But in the early decades of the American Republic, the church established its foothold in the south, relying on plantations and enslaved laborers for its survival and expansion, according to historians and archival documents. .
The Jesuits believed that slaves had souls, but they also viewed blacks as assets to buy and sell. At the time, the Catholic Church did not view the detention of slaves as immoral, according to the Reverend Thomas R. Murphy, a historian at the University of Seattle.
Thus, priests baptized the children of slaves, blessed their marriages and demanded that the people they possessed to attend mass, according to Jesuit records. But records also document the lashes, harsh plantation conditions, families torn apart by slave sales, and the hardships experienced by people shipped away from their homes as the church grew.
Yet the decision to sell almost all of Maryland’s Jesuit-owned slaves in the 1830s to raise money to save Georgetown and to support the strapped financial order left some priests deeply troubled. Life on the plantations of the Great South was notoriously brutal.
“Selling our slaves,” said some Jesuits, “was like selling their souls.”
But Jesuit rulers won out, signing an agreement in 1838 to sell 272 men, women, and children in one of the largest slave auctions recorded at the time.
Their story largely faded from public memory until 2015, when Georgetown President John J. DeGioia announced the creation of a task force on slavery and called for a nation-wide discussion. campus after the reopening of a building named in honor of 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, Mr Cellini set up 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 must have understood that this was done by the Catholic Church to my ancestors,” he said.
Then, Mr. Stewart said, 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, calling for formal negotiations.
A month later, Reverend 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 your ancestors”.
Father Sosa called for a process of “dialogue” between the Jesuits in the United States and the descendants.
In August of that year, Father Kesicki flew to Michigan to meet Mr. Stewart and his wife, Clara. He blessed their house. Then the two sat down for a conversation that would lay the groundwork for their negotiations.
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