Mary Elizabeth Lange
Founder of the Oblate Sisters of Providence.
Mary Elizabeth Lange, OSP (born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange; c. 1789 – February 3, 1882) was an American religious sister in Baltimore, Maryland who founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in 1829, the first African-American religious congregation in the United States. She was also, via the Oblates, the first African-American superior general.
The cause for her beatification was opened in 1991. Pope Francis named her as venerable on June 22, 2023.
Life
Early life
Lange was born in Saint-Domingue about 1789. It is said that her mother, Annette Lange, was the daughter of a Jewish plantation owner and an enslaved African woman. Her father, Clovis, was said to be an enslaved mulatto man on the same plantation.
During the Haitian Revolution, her parents escaped and took the family to Cuba, settling in Santiago de Cuba. There Lange received an excellent education. She left Cuba in the early 1800s and immigrated to the United States.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Elizabeth Lange” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.