Mother Henriette DeLille

Henriette DeLille was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans, on the eleventh of March 1812, into the city's community of free people of color. Her mother, Marie-Josèphe "Pouponne" Díaz, was a free Afro-Creole woman of African and French descent — technically a quadroon in the racial reckoning of the day — and her father was Jean-Baptiste Lille Sarpy, a white Frenchman and merchant. Her lineage reached back through ancestors who had purchased their own freedom, to a great-great-grandmother remembered as Nanette, an enslaved African most likely of the Senegambia region of West Africa.

Raised amid the plaçage custom that shaped many such unions, Henriette was expected to enter that same world. Instead, moved by faith, she turned toward God and toward the poorest around her — the sick, the enslaved, and free children denied instruction — teaching, nursing, and catechizing when it was unlawful to do so.

In the 1830s she gathered a small band of like-minded women of color and founded the community that became the Sisters of the Holy Family, the second enduring congregation of women religious of African descent in the Catholic Church. Its sisters opened one of the nation's early Catholic homes for the aged and carried their ministry through generations.

She died in New Orleans on the seventeenth of November 1862, worn out in service at forty-nine. Declared Venerable by the Church, she wrote of herself, "I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God." May her name be honored, and her quiet, unyielding love remembered.