Henriette Delille was born in 1812 in New Orleans, Louisiana, as a free woman of color. When she was 24, she experienced a religious conversion and proclaimed: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.” Henriette co-founded the Sisters of the Holy Family in 1842 — 20 years before the Civil War and before it was legal for this type of organization to exist. In 1847, the Society of the Holy Family was founded to support the sisters financially. The sisters responded to the need of treatment for the enslaved, elderly and sick, as well as care and education for the poor. Archbishop Philip M. Hannan began the canonization process for Henriette DeLille in 1988. Henriette was declared Venerable (the first step toward sainthood) by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.
Elizabeth Lange was born around 1794 in Santiago de Cuba. An educated woman, she left Cuba for Baltimore in the early 1800s. Since there was no free public education for African American children in Maryland, she opened a school in her home. At the behest of the Archbishop of Baltimore, Lange was approached with the idea of founding a religious congregation for the education of African American girls. On July 2, 1829, Lange and three other women professed their vows and became the Oblate Sisters of Providence — the first congregation of African American women religious in the history of the Catholic Church. Elizabeth, the foundress and first superior general, took the religious name Mary. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine for the Causes of Saints approved the cause of her sainthood in 2004, and Pope Francis declared her venerable in 2023.