"Influential" Ugandan Nun Shines Light on Sacred Tradition of Black Catholic Women

Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe's inclusion on Time magazine's 2014 list of the world's 100 most influential people represents a pivotal breakthrough moment for black Catholic nuns in the Atlantic world, although most people don't realize it.

Featured alongside the likes of Pope Francis and music entertainment mogul Beyoncé, Sister Rosemary is the first black nun to be named to this prestigious list of world leaders, and this fact should not be so easily overlooked.

After all, the 2013 controversy surrounding the casting of five-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald as Mother Abbess in NBC's live remake of The Sound of Music painfully revealed that there are still plenty of people in the world (and especially in the United States) who believe that black nuns are historical and contemporary impossibilities.

Moreover, Sister Rosemary's inclusion on Time 's "Most Influential" list is arguably as significant to the contemporary history of black nuns (and Catholic sisters more generally) as the canonization of St. Josephine Bakhita, who in 2000 became the first black woman to be declared a Catholic saint in the modern era.

Indeed, Time 's recognition of Sister Rosemary and her transformative ministry to young victims of sexual violence in Uganda and Sudan not only signals a major turning point in mainstream awareness (and acceptance) of black nuns, but also brings critical attention to one of the most significant, yet under-reported, social revolutions of black women in the contemporary era.

Over the past five decades, the global population of black Catholic nuns has experienced unprecedented growth, with the vast majority of new sisters coming from Africa. According to a Catholic World News report released in 2013, the population of African nuns increased by 28 percent between 2010 and 2011 -- the highest of any continent. When compared with only 18 percent growth in Asia and steep sister-population losses in Europe (-22 percent) and the Americas (-17 percent), it is clear that if this trend continues the dominant face of the Catholic sister will soon be brown, and most likely African.

Despite this historic shift in the racial and ethnic makeup of the global nun population, very little mainstream attention has been paid to this mass movement of black women and girls into Catholic religious life and its revolutionary implications for the Church and wider society.

By rejecting the confines of marriage and biological motherhood and renouncing the legitimacy of a world rampant with racial, sexual, economic, and religious oppression, African nuns are creating and sustaining social and educational institutions to uplift their respective communities (especially women and girls) from the ravages of war, poverty, and violence. They are also revitalizing and revolutionizing an ancient and sacred tradition of black women that has yet to be fully realized or documented in world history.

Since at least the 5th century, thousands upon thousands of black women and girls have professed the sacred vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the Roman Catholic Church. In doing so, they provided a powerful refutation to Europeans (and European-Americans) who characterized Africa-descended people as sub-human and used the ideology of white supremacy and racist manipulations of the Bible to justify African enslavement, segregation, and colonialism in the modern era. These black women and girls have also helped to transform celibacy into a radical sacrament of black liberation.

Because of the Catholic Church's deep social and economic investments in the institutions of slavery and apartheid in the Americas and Africa, black nuns were severely marginalized within the Church and female religious life prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In particular, the longstanding practices of racial exclusion and segregation in female religious life kept the global population of black nuns numerically low (and statistically insignificant in certain areas of the world) well into the 20th century. Nonetheless, by embracing the celibate state and pioneering black educational and catechetical ministries, black sisters forced an often reluctant Church hierarchy to adhere to Catholic social teachings and commit vital resources to its vast black constituencies. They also used their religious calls to contest assaults on black morality and humanity throughout the Atlantic world.

In the United States, for example, black women founded the Western world's first black congregations to ensure the development of black female religious life and the African-American apostolate (mission). Of the eight known historically black Catholic sisterhoods established in the U.S., all were founded in the South, where the vast majority of black Americans resided, and all but one were (or slated to be) teaching communities.

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In the case of the Baltimore-based Oblate Sisters of Providence (1828-present), and the New Orleans-based Sisters of the Holy Family (1842-present), both congregations were founded in cities that contained two of the nation's largest slave markets, where nude and partially nude black bodies were abused, displayed, and sold on the auction block on a daily basis.

Group Photo of the Oblate Sisters of Providence at St. Frances Convent in Baltimore, MD, 1929 Courtesy of the Archives of the Oblate Sisters of Providence Unsurprisingly then, some of the earliest black nuns in the U.S. (several of whom were slaves, ex-slaves, or slave descendants) illegally taught free and enslaved black children and established some of the nation's earliest Catholic schools, orphanages, and nursing homes open to African Americans. After the Civil War, the Holy Family Sisters went so far as to seek the spiritual recovery of several sites in New Orleans associated with the sins of racism, slavery, and the sexual exploitation of black women and girls. Between 1870 and 1900, the order purchased several properties, including a former slave traders' pen and the French Quarter's infamous Orleans Ballroom, and transformed them into some of the congregation's earliest schools and administrative headquarters.

Photo of Several Sisters of the Holy Family at their Motherhouse in the French Quarter, New Orleans, LA, c. 1899 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 Following the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, black sisters emerged from their convents ready to challenge the barriers that had long blocked their full and equal participation in their Church. Those in historically white and European orders in particular began to testify publicly about the racist abuses to which they had long been subjected and were still enduring in their congregations.

In 1968, 155 of the approximately 1,000 black Catholic sisters living and laboring in the United States, including two representatives from Uganda and Kenya, established the National Black Sisters' Conference (NBSC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to protest racism and sexism in the Church and wider society. Organized by 25-year-old Sister M. Martin de Porres (Patricia Muriel) Grey, Pittsburgh's first black Religious Sister of Mercy and the only woman present at the founding meeting of the Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, the conference marked the first time that black sisters had met on a unified stage in their 156-year-old history in the U.S.

Sister M. Martin de Porres, R.S.M.; NBSC Foundresses at Mount Mercy College, August 1968 Chief Architect of the NBSC, c. 1967; Courtesy of the National Black Sisters' Conference Courtesy of Dr. Patricia Grey Soon thereafter, the NBSC emerged as an important conduit for black sisters' entry into the various freedom struggles sweeping the Atlantic world. It also led to a radical reimagining of the roles of that black nuns could play in society and politics.

Like their foremothers in the Church, activist-oriented black sisters linked celibacy explicitly to black liberation, noting the utility of such in times of great social change and upheaval. As Holy Family Sister Theresa Perry put it in 1970, "To be celibate means that we have dedicated ourselves totally and completely to building the new...to ushering in the future...The challenge is to free yourself enough so you can free other people."

However, in the two decades following Vatican II, the population of black nuns in select parts of the world began to plummet. In the United States, for example, black sisters departed religious life at nearly double the rate of their white counterparts. While some black nuns left on their own accord or in explicit protest to racism in the Church, several African-American nuns were expelled from their congregations as punishment for their political activism. As Adrian Dominican Sister M. Shawn Copelandput it in 1975, "the future of the black Catholic nun [in the U.S.] is dubious."

By the end of the 20 th century, it was clear that the future and salvation of black female religious life laid in Africa, where vocations remained strong, and the current global spotlight on Sister Rosemary and her ministry is a testament to it.

Because embracing the celibate religious state has historically enabled black women and girls to contest and transcend the most harrowing of circumstances, it is likely that the African sister population will continue to grow. If so, the increasing presence and international visibility of African sisters laboring outside of Africa may even lead to a reversal in the declining numbers of sisters in Europe and the Americas in the coming decades. As a result, the Catholic Church may finally be able to live up to its fullest (and most revolutionary) potential in the areas of the world that need its resources the most. And black sisters may very well lead the way.