The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human Beings
Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, one of the oldest Roman Catholic girls schools in the nation, has long celebrated the vision and generosity of its founders: a determined band of Catholic nuns who championed free education for the poor in the early 1800s.
The sisters, who established an elite academy in Washington, D.C., also ran a Saturday school, free to any young girl who wished to learn including slaves, at a time when public schools were almost nonexistent and teaching slaves to read was illegal, according to an official history posted for several years on the schools website.
But when a newly hired school archivist and historian started digging in the convents records a few years ago, she found no evidence that the nuns had taught enslaved children to read or write. Instead, she found records that documented a darker side of the orders history.
The Georgetown Visitation sisters owned at least 107 enslaved men, women and children, the records show. And they sold dozens of those people to pay debts and to help finance the expansion of their school and the construction of a new chapel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/sunday/nuns-slavery.html
Farmer-Rick
(10,160 posts)The religious can justify any evil because of a supernatural magical being.
marble falls
(57,077 posts)ROB-ROX
(767 posts)It is good to know the correct history versus a nice TALE. Exposing both the good and the bad is nice to know. Those who write their own history always place a BETTER recorded version of their own history. An example is the confederates in the United States. Those people went to war with the US and they were all true TRAITORS. The south has glorified these people and still hate the people in the US. The true history when discovered should be SHARED so that we do not make future mistakes which repeat bad history.......