Mother Mary Lange: Religious Sister and Community Mobilizer
“We have been created to love and be loved, and God has become man to make it possible for us to love as he loved us. He makes himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the sick one, the one in prison, the lonely one, the unwanted one … He is hungry for our love” (Mother Teresa).
“I Thirst”: Using Our Gifts to Quench Christ’s Thirst
In a message by Pope St. John Paul II for Lent 1993, the great pope called the Church to reflect on Jesus’ words, “I thirst” (John 19:28) and “Give me a drink” (John 4:7). In these words, he wrote, ‘we hear a cry from the poor, especially those who did not have access to clean water’. In a subsequent letter to the Missionaries of Charity, St. Teresa of Calcutta (then simply known as Mother Teresa) elaborated on this message:
“‘I thirst’ is something much deeper than Jesus just saying ‘I love you.’ Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you — you can’t begin to know who He wants to be [for] you. Or who He wants you to be for Him.”
This Lent, Catholic Women in Business invites you to reflect with us on how Jesus thirsts for each one of us and how we can quench His thirst — through prayer, through sacrifice, through loving His children who are most in need (and there are so many this Lent in particular!). In our content this season, we’ll be exploring how, as Catholic professionals, we can begin to understand “who He wants to be” for us, “who He wants [us] to be for Him,” and how we can share His great love for us all with everyone we encounter.
Mother Mary Lange accomplished a lot in her lifetime, from 1784 to 1882. One of her many charitable missions was helping to nurse the sick back to health in the 1830s during the Cholera epidemic. With what we have been through with the COVID-19 pandemic, can you imagine going through such a disruption from a communicable disease nearly 200 years ago without the comforts and technology we have today? Resilient and full of grit, Mother Mary Lange is an example of a woman of faith in action.
Her Dedication to Education
Born as Elizabeth Clarisse Lange in Santiago de Cuba, she most likely grew up in the French-speaking area, where she was educated due to her family’s social standing. Elizabeth left Cuba for security in the U.S. She landed in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1800s, where there were great quantities of French-speaking Catholic refugees because of the Haitian Revolution.
Known as an independent thinker and doer, Elizabeth was a deeply spiritual woman. She realized the children of Caribbean immigrants needed an education and was determined to meet this need. Despite being a Black woman in a slave state long before the Emancipation Proclamation, she used her own home and money to teach children of color. With friend and roommate Marie Magdelaine Balas, Elizabeth offered free education to children at Fells Point, Baltimore.
Her Religious Vocation
Reverend James Hector Joubert and Archbishop James Whitfield asked Elizabeth to start a school for girls of color in 1828. At that time, Elizabeth confided in Fr. Joubert that she wanted to commit her life to God and asked him if she could start a women’s religious order. With Fr. Joubert’s financial assistance and direction, Elizabeth started the first congregation of Black women — an amazing feat, as Black men and women were so often not able to pursue religious life at this time in history. On July 2, 1829, Elizabeth and three other women took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. From then on, as founder and first superior of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Elizabeth became known as Sister Mary.
In today’s times, I believe Mother Mary would have related to the term “community mobilizer” very much. She served the Oblates as a superior general and worked as a domestic worker at Saint Mary’s Seminary for 10 years. With the Oblates, she created an academy, orphanage, widow’s home, and night school for Black adults to learn to read and write.
Mother Mary lived through a period of much racial injustice and poverty, and her order sought to fill the holistic needs of the people they were serving, offering spiritual direction, religious educational classes, and vocational training. At the end of the Civil War, Baltimore became a home for Black war orphans. Mother Mary hosted several of them and started caring for destitute children.
At times, Mother Mary struggled with abandonment, as her closest companions, co-workers, and companions moved on and student numbers dwindled. Still, her invitation to live her vocation remained, and her steadfastness duty to her order brought God’s love to so many.
In 1991, Cardinal Keeler, then the archbishop of Baltimore, opened a formal investigation into Mother Mary’s life to lead the way to her canonization as saint in the Catholic Church. As women in business, we can take to heart Mother Mary’s work ethic, loyalty to her community, and continual stride toward union with God despite extremely challenging and unjust circumstances.
Molly Franzonello is a wife and health care systems innovator in Washington, D.C. When not driving all over the metropolitan area to see “her people,” you can find her reading, writing, researching, or staycationing at her favorite spots in the District.