Jesuit-aided effort benefiting former slaves' descendants seeks to atone for 'sinful' past
Having grown up Catholic in small-town Louisiana, Monique Maddox is devoutly and deliberately faithful, visibly involved in her church. When her time comes, she said, she doesn’t want the priest conducting her funeral trying to memorialize someone he doesn’t know; she wants her work to speak for her.
So in 2016, when Maddox learned not only that the Catholic church had held slaves, but that her ancestors had been among them, it prompted a crisis of faith. To see her great-great-grandfather reduced to a physical description with a price tag, to think about how he was likely treated: “How could I ever look a priest in the eye in the same way?” she wondered.
Ultimately, after deep prayer, she decided she had to move on.
“I couldn’t live my life in hurt and anger and shame forever,” she said. “So began the process of forgiveness and moving forward.”
Maddox is now president and chief executive of the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation, a $1 billion initiative created in 2019 with similar intentions. The foundation aims to address and heal the wounds of those whose ancestors were enslaved by the Catholic Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, through programs working for restorative justice and racial equity.
“While the Jesuit mission in the United States has flourished into 27 institutions of higher education and 80 secondary and pre-secondary schools with billions of dollars in net worth, the median net-worth of descendants’ families today is only 10 percent that of their white counterparts,” the foundation notes on its website.
The effort represents a unique partnership led by the Jesuits and a group of descendants linked to the order’s 1838 sale of 272 men, women and children from its five Maryland plantations to plantation owners in southern Louisiana, one of the largest such sales in U.S. history.
The transaction benefitted what is now Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and while the event had been documented by academics, it remained largely unknown to the public until a 2016 story about the sale appeared in The New York Times.
Maddox had clicked on that story, curious about the link between slavery and a prominent Jesuit institution. She and her family were among a 4% minority of American Catholics who are Black, and while she often suspected her ancestors had been enslaved, she had no way to know the truth.
As she opened the article, she encountered a familiar image – a photo of the graveyard where her father and other family members were buried.
“This cemetery is a half mile down the road from where I grew up, in a little town of 1,100,” Maddox said. “It’s an obscure place no one knows about, except those who are from Louisiana.”
She called her mother over and continued to read. A link in the story led them to the Georgetown Slavery Archive, which included the manifest of the Katherine Jackson, the ship that had carried the slaves from Maryland to Louisiana in 1838.
There, her mother recognized several people with her maiden name – and the name of her great-grandfather.
“I’m just sitting there trying to figure it out,” Maddox remembered. “How did this happen?”
Jesuits' role in slavery comes to light
As Maddox confronted her spiritual doubts, she reached out to the university, which connected her with other descendants hungry for more information.
At the time, the racial reckoning that followed the 2014 police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, had prompted institutions like Georgetown to confront the sins of their past, and word of the sale had started to gain attention. Georgetown students conducted protests decrying a campus building named for the Rev. Thomas Mulledy, the former school president who had orchestrated the 1838 sale.
But as Maddox and others began to learn and uncover their ancestors’ history, they realized it wasn’t just about Georgetown; it was about the Jesuits themselves, whose involvement in slavery had been little known.
“Most people did not know the history,” Georgetown history professor Adam Rothman wrote in a 2020 article published in the Journal of Jesuit Studies. “Despite the existence of substantial scholarship on the Jesuits and slavery, the mere fact that the Maryland Jesuits owned and sold people came as a surprise and a shock to many in the Georgetown community and the broader public.”
The obscurity of that history, so at odds with the Jesuits’ modern emphasis on social justice, was what spurred the Rev. Thomas Murphy to make the topic the subject of his dissertation and, ultimately, a book.
The Jesuits arrived in the colonies in 1634, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, and by the early 1700s were known to rely on forced labor.
All Catholic religious orders operating in the American South had slaves, often received as gifts from benefactors to offer financial security, Murphy said. In Maryland, Catholics often operated plantations to finance their outreach and to comply with colonial law limiting their religious services to private property; their manor houses often featured adjoining chapels.
“They thought the primary thing was their responsibility for the spiritual welfare of their slaves and getting them into heaven,” Murphy said. “Abandoning them might cause them to become Protestant, which to them meant eternal damnation.”
The Maryland Jesuits were drawn into slavery, he said, as a way of conforming to the colonial system in which they were trying to operate, so as not to upset secular authorities. There also was little pushback from the church in Rome: not until the late 1880's, Murphy said, would the Pope definitively declare slavery to be morally wrong.
The 1838 sale required permission from Rome, said the Rev. Timothy Kesicki, the former president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the U.S. who now chairs the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation trust. Initially denied, the sale was granted with certain conditions: Keep families together. Educate the young. Care for the elderly. Use the monies for good.
Kesicki is quick to add that despite those conditions, there’s no justification for the sale, or the Jesuit participation in slavery.
“It was sinful, it was morally blind and it was flawed,” he said. “And it has taken on new meaning now that we’re hearing from living descendants.”
More than 10,600 descendants from the 1838 sale have been identified so far by nonprofit genealogical group Georgetown Memory Project.
In 2016, Kesicki delivered the order’s formal apology for its role in enslavement in an address delivered at Georgetown. But descendants felt the admission was a first step; now, what would the Jesuits do about it?
“We said, you have admitted you did this and that this is a sin; how are you going to reconcile with that?” Maddox said. “You can’t set the terms of your own penance. Let us help you.”
The two sides engaged in dialogue and coalesced around creation of a charitable foundation that aligned with the conditions that had governed the 1838 sale. Most agreed: They weren’t in this to put money in their pockets; rather, they wanted to achieve something that was bigger than themselves.
A 'moral response' to a 'sinful past'
The Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation is built on three pillars. In partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, it offers up to $10,000 in educational assistance to descendants of Jesuit slavery; that program has awarded more than $166,000 in scholarships to 21 recipients since its debut last fall.
A second program helps descendant seniors age safely at home with the help of occupational therapists who assess needs like exterior railings or wider doorways, while another focuses on racial healing through, for instance, dialogue sessions between young descendants and Jesuits in training and a traveling art exhibit set to launch in New Orleans later this year.
The Jesuits have pledged $100 million to the trust, Kesicki said, with about $45 million in cash and commitments garnered thus far from its network of Jesuit institutions and the sale of former plantation lands. Ultimately, the foundation hopes to raise $1 billion.
For its part, Kesicki said, Georgetown University has committed $10 million to the effort and introduced a curriculum examining the school’s links to slavery and reconciliation efforts. Mulledy Hall has been renamed Isaac Hawkins Hall in honor of the first enslaved person listed in the 1838 sale document.
“We know that in the landscape of social justice that a billion dollars is a drop in the bucket,” Kesicki said, “but it shows a moral response to a very sinful past that we hope and pray is a model for thousands of organizations in this country that trace their foundations to slavery.”
It hasn’t been easy. Some don’t want to hear about what they deem ancient or unpleasant history.
Meanwhile, the same debates accompanying discussions of slavery reparations in greater society permeate the order as well: Some feel a moral urgency while others criticize the effort as unfairly burdening the entities of today or suggesting the order’s ongoing work with the poor should suffice.
“The Jesuit orders are a microcosm of society,” Kesicki said. “But the foundation is essential if we want any healing to happen.”
Maddox said a similar microcosm exists on the descendants’ side, with some supporting the foundation and others calling for class-action lawsuits.
“I know for myself, there is no amount of money that will make me feel good about this,” she said. “There’s no settling with this history. Instead, we are trying to create a relationship that’s a model for what could be in this world.”