During the festivities marking the semiquincentennial of the United States, Americans will hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” in many parades, sporting events and barbecues. Yet few will pause to consider the anthem’s origin in the besieged city of Baltimore during the War of 1812. Amid the “rockets’ red glare” and “bombs bursting in air,” in times of war and of peace, Baltimore has played a central role in the foundation of the American Republic and American Catholicism.
Indeed, Baltimore was the home of the first major Catholic community in the fledgling nation. And among these residents were a notable number of Black Catholics.
In 1785, Bishop John Carroll noted that at least 3,000 Black Catholics lived across Baltimore and Maryland. This population, free and enslaved, came from across Africa as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, these Black Catholics traced their spiritual lineage to Africa’s Atlantic Coast, from present-day Senegal to Angola. Many enslaved Africans arrived directly to Baltimore via the Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, Baltimore’s port and mills attracted many free Black families who helped settle and develop the city, which rapidly became an industrial hub in the early republic. They contributed to the diversity of the city and its Catholic landscape. Their numbers swelled with refugees fleeing Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), as white enslavers took their human property with them northward up the Atlantic.
As many Black Catholics received emancipation, they would go on to form their first lay society, the Society of the Holy Family, which became a center of Catholic and Black religious life in Baltimore. The society, which was known for its music, attracted overflowing crowds to its meeting place in St. Peter’s Pro-Cathedral’s parish hall. The society recorded its history in a journal, which reveals this legacy and its place in the wider Black Atlantic world. Black Catholics, along with other American Catholics, did not exist in a vacuum, but rather reflected a global network of influences that formed their practices, particularly around praise of the Holy Spirit, music and mutual aid.
Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., the founding father of Black Catholic history, wrote that in 1793, in Fell’s Point, six ships carried Black and white refugees from Saint-Domingue. The French-speaking Black Catholics settled into a new spiritual home in the basement chapel of the Sulpician seminary on Paca Street. From there, over the next 50 years, free and enslaved members of Baltimore’s Black Catholic community expanded. They were joined by non-French-speaking Black Catholics of Haitian descent, as well as English-speaking Black Catholics whose ancestors had been in Baltimore and Maryland since its time as a colony of Great Britain. One Black Catholic family, the Butlers, rose to particular prominence among Baltimorean Catholics through their involvement in church lay matters and their connections with other Catholic families of note. Two Black Catholic women of Haitian descent, Mary Elizabeth Lange (now Venerable) and Maria Magdeleine Balas, founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first Black Catholic religious community in the United States, in order to tend to the physical and spiritual needs of Baltimore’s Black Catholics.
Baltimore witnessed another Black Catholic first in 1843: the establishment of the first Black Catholic lay society, the Society of the Holy Family. An 8-inch by 6.5-inch journal recording the first two years of its existence, preserved in the archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Associated Sulpicians of America, offers a rare window into antebellum Black Catholic life, when so much was not recorded. I first encountered the journal in an archive in July 2022. The journal contains three sections: membership dues, cathedral subscriptions and donations, and minutes of meetings. Father John H. Hickey, a Sulpician priest who worked with Baltimore’s Black Catholics, recorded the entries, which recount the society’s events and operations. Some families who appear in the journal also appear in enslavement documents and diocesan and sacramental records.
The journal’s inaugural entry is dated Dec. 3, 1843, the First Sunday of Advent. Between 150 and 200 Black Catholic men and women attended, filling Calvert Hall, the basement parish hall of St. Peter’s Pro-Cathedral in downtown Baltimore. The meeting began with an invocation of the Holy Spirit, followed by catechism lessons “on the Great Truths of Religion.” Members then discussed how to ensure a collective lay administration of the society; they would vote at the following week’s meeting for an official name, the Society of the Holy Family. The rest of the meeting included much singing and almsgiving, before adjournment. The journal shows how members of the Society of the Holy Family, who through bonds of solidarity and community worship sought to uplift each other materially and spiritually through their shared Catholicism.
The Society of the Holy Family’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit, singing and mutual aid echoes pre-Tridentine lay traditions spread by Iberian, mostly Portuguese, missionaries to West Africa and preserved across the Black Atlantic world. The historian Jeroen Dewulf’s Afro-Atlantic Catholics“ explores how Portuguese confraternities, lay organizations with activities that involved both men and women, spread from Senegambia to Angola. Catholic Africans across the social spectrum embraced confraternities. The invocation of the Holy Spirit, musical performances including singing, and mutual aid via almsgiving were central. Enslavement and the Middle Passage could not erase these practices.
The scholar Albert Raboteau has noted “a hemispheric perspective” with Black religion. He identified shared traits between African American Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic, in the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. The same emphases on the Holy Spirit, music and charity would persist in Black Protestant denominations across the United States and re-emerge with the Society of the Holy Family in the basement of Calvert Hall.
The Society of the Holy Family’s journal reveals this legacy and its place in the wider Black Atlantic world. Black Catholics reflected a global network of influences that formed their practices. Members paid monthly dues. These dues went into a collections fund that supported the poor, Masses for the dead, burials, cathedral debt and miscellaneous meeting expenses like furniture and lighting. This was not charity from the Archdiocese of Baltimore or the Sulpicians. This was lay-driven mutual aid, which saw Black Catholic members determine where they spent their society’s almsgiving funds to serve their community.
Tia Noelle Pratt, a noted scholar of Black Catholics, has shown how these organizations allowed Black Catholics to preserve identity and agency amid racism inside and outside the church. The society’s journal testifies to the continuance of West African Catholic traditions to Baltimore’s Black Catholics, a link from one Black Catholic community to another. Music is present throughout the journal’s pages and most powerfully embodies this Black Atlantic connection. On Thursdays before meetings, the society took great care to rehearse the hymns they would perform during meetings. From the opening invocation of the Holy Spirit, songs would resound from Calvert Hall. Members established a subsociety for singers and instrumentalists, who performed during meetings. A fife-and-drum piece moved members. Jane Thompson, a key society member, sang solo hymns from the Gospel of John and “about the rock of Peter.”
The journal records how Thompson and the other musicians’ performances attracted “strangers” to the society’s meetings. Many of these strangers were Black Protestants, reflecting musical solidarity and outreach across denominational affiliations. These practices directly reflect the musical performances so central to lay West African confraternity societies that Iberian missionaries introduced and that survived the Middle Passage. The Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland has noted Black Catholic music’s liberatory effect, allowing Black Catholics to cultivate their own community’s spiritual needs within the church. Cardinal Wilton Gregory calls this “Black American cultural genius,” which has allowed for Black expressions of music that remain orthodox Catholic practices.
Session after session, the journal notes the community present in Calvert Hall invoking the Holy Spirit and performing hymns. While in other African communities across the Atlantic World such invocations often took the form of the “conjuring” of spirits, as their ancestors in Africa had done, the Society of the Holy Family’s members would specifically “conjure” the Holy Spirit. Rehearsals saw marked improvement during meetings, which the journal recorded as “splendid” and “excellent.” Increased attendance at later meetings likely resulted from the improved musical performances. Members were encouraged and actively participated in bringing their musical gifts to meetings, whether it was through their skills with instruments or spontaneous vocal solos. All these performances were a central pillar to the Society of the Holy Family and reflected a spiritual and symphonic connection to the historical West African confraternities. The same communal singing that had been a part of confraternities from Senegambia to Angola contributed to the formation of a Black Catholic identity in Calvert Hall.
The Society of the Holy Family’s final recorded journal entry is dated Oct. 21, 1845. Seemingly, the society dissolved on this date, although references to a “Society of the Holy Family” appear in the 1850s in the annal records of the Oblate Sisters of Providence. Whether or not the society lasted is not necessarily important. What is important is that, like the national parishes of their Irish, Italian and Polish American coreligionists, Baltimore’s Black Catholics established and asserted a unique spiritual place within American Catholicism. They formed their own society based on their shared Black identity, demonstrating Black Catholics’ historical rootedness in American Catholicism. Unlike these groups, whose spiritual traditions crossed the Atlantic of their own accord in the 19th century, the Society’s spiritual traditions had crossed the Atlantic centuries earlier and not in a free state. In a city known for being the origin of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Black Catholics forged an authentic spiritual identity, rooted in both orthodox Catholicism and their wider connections in the Black Atlantic world. Black Catholics were there at and played an essential role in shaping American Catholicism before the founding of the United States.
Today, the American Catholic Church grapples with questions regarding race and the involvement of the laity. The Society of the Holy Family’s journal reminds us these matters were always present within the church, even if obscured. The journal records a lay Black Catholic effort to shape their faith. Even if the Society of the Holy Family did not survive the antebellum period, it showed how a West African-rooted Catholicism could thrive in the United States, well before anyone envisioned a Black Atlantic world.
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