Josephites founded to Evangelize Black America

They weren’t actually founded on this day, but Black History Month makes this a good time to talk about the Josephites (advertised here in this 1890’s flyer). Officially named St. Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart in 1893, the Josephites are unique among American religious communities. They started as an offshoot of the Mill Hill Fathers, an English missionary society that answered the call to evangelize America’s newly freed slaves. In 1871, the Mill Hills took over St. Francis Xavier, an African-American parish in Baltimore. The late Josephite historian Father Peter Hogan writes that this event “began a consistent commitment to the Black community by a male religious group, although they had been preceded, decades earlier, by two female groups, the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of the Holy Family.” (More to come on Holy Family this week.) In 1888 the American Mill Hills opened an integrated seminary, St. Joseph’s, in Baltimore. In 1891 they ordained Father Charkes Randolph Uncles, the first African-American priest who was trained and ordained in the United States. As the society’s leadership in England expanded its outreach to the far reaches of the British Empire, its American members, led by New Yorker John R. Slattery, felt that such steps weakened the outreach to the African-American community. In 1892 Slattery got permission from the Archbishop of Baltimore to start a separate American society under the patronage of St. Joseph. Five members, including Slattery, took first vows in 1893. Today the Josephite ministry to the Black community continues in forty-two American and two Caribbean dioceses.