Henriette DeLille

Henriette Díaz DeLille was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 11 March 1813, into a family of free people of color in the city's French Creole community. Her mother, Marie-Josèphe Díaz, was a free woman of mixed African, French, and Spanish ancestry, and her father was Jean-Baptiste Lille Sarpy, a white man of French descent. In accordance with the plaçage custom then widespread among New Orleans Creoles, her parents were not legally married. Henriette was raised in relative comfort and received an education typical of young women of her class, including instruction in French, music, and the domestic arts, as well as some training in nursing the sick. Her mother intended that she should follow the same path of plaçage, becoming the consort of a wealthy white man, but Henriette was drawn instead to a life of prayer and service.

Influenced by the example of religious women in New Orleans and by her own deepening Catholic faith, DeLille rejected the social expectations of her milieu. In the 1820s and 1830s she began teaching children of color and caring for the poor, the elderly, and the sick, including enslaved people, at a time when educating enslaved persons was restricted or forbidden by law. Around 1836 she and several companions formed an informal association of pious women dedicated to these works of mercy. Their efforts met resistance from both civil society and, at times, from ecclesiastical authorities wary of a community of women of color living in common.

In 1842 DeLille, together with Juliette Gaudin and Josephine Charles, established the congregation that became known as the Sisters of the Holy Family. The community received the support of the Sulpician priest Étienne Rousselon and, eventually, of the bishops of New Orleans. The sisters took as their mission the education of girls of color, the care of orphans and the aged, and the nursing of the sick and dying. They founded a hospice for the elderly, an orphanage, and schools, working among the poorest residents of New Orleans regardless of race. DeLille herself was known for her austerity, her devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and her insistence on serving those whom society most neglected.

The congregation grew slowly amid the hardships of antebellum Louisiana and the outbreak of the American Civil War. Henriette DeLille died in New Orleans on 17 November 1862, at the age of forty-nine, likely of tuberculosis. She was buried in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 2. The Sisters of the Holy Family continued and expanded her work after her death. In the twentieth century her cause for canonization was introduced; she was declared a Servant of God and, on 27 March 2010, Pope Benedict XVI promulgated a decree recognizing her heroic virtue, thereby granting her the title Venerable. She has not been beatified or canonized. Her life is remembered as a witness to charity and to the dignity of people of African descent in the Catholic Church in the United States.