U.S. Bishop the Son of a Slave

Yes, there was a Catholic bishop in the United States whose mother had been a Negro slave.  He was James Augustine Healy (1830-1900), second bishop of Portland Maine.  He was born in Macon, Georgia, to Michael Healy, an Irish immigrant planter, and his Negro wife, Mary Eliza. Mr. Healy had to purchase his bride-to-be from Samuel Griswald, a large plantation owner. Since interracial marriages were not considered legal at that time in Georgia, nor were Negroes allowed in the state’s schools, Michael and Eliza had to send their five boys north for an education. When Holy Cross College opened in Worcester, Massachusetts, two of the Healy boys, James and Hugh, were in the first graduating class. The future bishop was valedictorian. Three more of the Healy boys would graduate from Holy Cross.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Holy Cross was a great Catholic College, and the Jesuits that ran it were Ignatian. His teachers must have had a strong influence on James because, after graduation, he entered the Sulpician Seminary, first in Montreal, and afterwards in Paris, where, in 1854, he was ordained a priest in Notre Dame Cathedral.  Although the Sulpicians wanted him to be a seminary professor, Father Healy requested a pastoral assignment. Returning to Massachusetts, the newly-ordained served as assistant pastor in Boston, then pastor of Saint James parish in South Boston, and finally as vicar-general of the Boston archdiocese.  As parish priest, this son of a slave woman, gave the bulk of his energies to ministering to the poor Irish immigrants.  He also had to master the art of being a peacemaker because the Negros and the Irish, having to compete for the lowest paying jobs, were often at each others’ throats.

In 1875, after twenty years of labor in the Boston archdiocese, Father Healy was consecrated a bishop for the diocese of Portland, Maine. In Maine his physical labors increased a hundred fold.  The whole state was his diocese. And throughout the whole state he traveled in order to visit every Catholic parish and outpost.  All this traveling was not only exhausting, but dangerous. Protestants in nineteenth century New England did not take kindly to Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, more especially ordained Irish Catholics.  One priest, in colonial times, had been tarred and feathered by a Maine mob when he ignored the law prohibiting priests in the territory.

In the twenty-five years he served as Bishop of the Portland diocese, Healy established 60 new churches, 68 missions, 18 convents and 18 schools.  He was an ardent advocate for all the poor and the downtrodden; he fought to enact laws that would have put an end to child labor; and he even lobbied for the Indians that they might retain their sovereignty.  Bishop Healy was not raised in poverty, but he opted to identify with it.   He refused to live in the Bishop’s mansion, but took up residence instead living at the cathedral rectory.  And he refused to participate in anything that smacked of racial or national divides in the Church.  Although he was the first African-American to be ordained either a priest or a bishop, he declined when invited to attend the first African-American Catholic Conference.  “We are of that Church,” he wrote in explanation, “where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian nor Scythian, slave nor freeman, but Christ is all and in all.”

Even in death, which came to him in 1900, Bishop Healy chose to be poor.  Rather than being buried in the cathedral vault, where Portland’s first bishop was entombed, he preferred to be buried in South Portland’s Calvary Cemetary under a Celtic cross headstone.