Sainthood petition during Black History Month - Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange

Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange statue in St. Mary's Seminary Chapel in Baltimore.

Link to my blog about advocating for her cause for Sainthood is reported on the Let's Write blogspot:

Order of black nuns founded in 1829 by Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange; a stone monument marks the spot where Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange established the Oblate Sisters of Providence.

Lange encountered difficulty as a free black woman in Maryland, a slave-holding state and as a French-speaking Catholic.

610 George St.

One of Baltimore's many fascinating, oft-forgotten stories is that of Elizabeth Clarissa Lange, a Haitian woman born in the late 1700s who eventually settled in Baltimore, where she ran a school in her home. That school became the St. Frances Academy Baltimore School for Colored Girls in 1828, and in 1829 Lange, along with three other women of African descent, became nuns. Later that year, Sister Mary Elizabeth Lange helped found the Oblate Sisters of Providence, which, after Pope Gregory XVI's 1831 approval, became the first Roman Catholic order for women of African descent. A monument to this pioneer stands in Perkins Spring Square Park, near where she first started the Oblate Sisters.

Elizabeth Lange (1784-1882) was born in Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), to a Jewish merchant father and a mulatto mother. After an uprising in Haiti, the family fled to Cuba, and eventually to Baltimore, where they settled in a home near Fells Point in 1813.

Mother Lange was 98 when she died in 1882. 

In 1991, the Oblate Sisters and the Archdiocese of Baltimore, with the approval of the Vatican, began the process that could make Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange a saint. A letter writing petition to advance this cause has been launched in Baltimore. See my blog link above for more information.