“An
absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church,
whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and,
thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette
Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The
Hemingses of Monticello
and On
Juneteenth
In
1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272
enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now
Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist,
author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through
nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to
uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the
United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns
illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to
sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.
The
story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of
the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an
indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom
stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed
down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those
descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in
the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were
put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape, but the
other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would
remain apart until Rachel Swarns’s reporting in The New York Times
finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272
descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make
amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement
for reparations and reconciliation in America.
Swarns’s
journalism has already started a national conversation about
universities with ties to slavery. The
272
tells an even bigger story, not only demonstrating how slavery fueled
the growth of the American Catholic Church but also shining a light
on the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest
religious denomination in the nation.
