Julia Greeley

Julia Greeley was born into slavery in Hannibal, Missouri, at an uncertain date in the mid-nineteenth century, generally placed by historians and her later Catholic biographers between 1833 and 1848. As an enslaved child she suffered a lasting injury when a slaveholder’s whip, reportedly intended for her mother, destroyed the sight of one of her eyes. After emancipation at the close of the American Civil War she earned her living as a domestic servant. By about 1880 she had settled in Denver, Colorado, where she worked in the household of William Gilpin, the first territorial governor of Colorado, and his wife Julia Pratte Gilpin.

In 1880 Greeley was received into the Catholic Church at Sacred Heart Parish in Denver. She remained a devout laywoman for the rest of her life, supporting herself by cooking and housekeeping while giving away nearly everything she earned. She became known throughout the city as Denver’s Angel of Charity. At night she pulled a small wagon through the streets, delivering food, coal, clothing, and other necessities to poor families so that recipients would not be embarrassed by daytime charity. She was especially attentive to households that had suffered fire or other disaster, and she assisted both African American and white laborers in a city still marked by racial division.

Greeley had a strong devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and spent years walking long distances to distribute Sacred Heart leaflets. She visited Denver’s firehouses regularly, bringing literature and encouragement to firefighters, whom she regarded as men who risked their lives for others. In 1901 she was professed as a member of the Secular Franciscan Order at St. Elizabeth’s Church. She never married and had no children; her decades in Denver are documented as those of a single working woman living in rented rooms and boarding houses, often in deep poverty of her own.

She died in Denver on 7 June 1918, which that year fell on the Feast of the Sacred Heart. Destitute, she was first buried in a simple grave at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, though her funeral drew large crowds of people she had quietly assisted. In 2016 the Archdiocese of Denver opened a cause for her canonization, and she received the title Servant of God. In 2017 her remains were exhumed and transferred to the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, where she became the first person interred in that church. If the cause proceeds to canonization, she would be among the first African Americans from the American West raised to the altars of the Catholic Church.