Happy Friday, P.O.U.!
We continue our series on Black Saints and Popes II.
THE VENERABLE PIERRE TOUSSAINT
Pierre Toussaint isn’t a saint…yet. In 1996, he was declared “Venerable” by Pope John Paul II, and in 2003 he was declared a candidate for Beatification — one step before canonization — after proof showed that he cured a 5 yr-old boy of scoliosis in 2000. Nevertheless, I decided to include Mr. Toussaint in this series because there is some controversy surrounding his candidacy for canonization.
While some Black Catholics look upon Mr. Toussaint as charitable and deserving of sainthood, others are against it, saying that he was “a docile slave” who ran instead of fighting for freedom in Haiti. The following New York Times article from Feb. 23, 1992 discusses this debate.
Canonizing a Slave: Saint or Uncle Tom?
By DEBORAH SONTAG
Published: February 23, 1992
Pierre Toussaint has been dead 139 years. But the way he lived his life is now the subject of a heated debate among American Catholics that reveals much about the modern-day church’s complicated and sometimes awkward relations with its black parishioners.
For Pierre Toussaint was born, and chose to stay, a slave. At a time when slaves were rebelling in his native Haiti he was accompanying his owners to New York, where they lost their fortune but not his loyalty. By day Toussaint the coiffeur would earn money powdering and pomading the heads of New York society. By night, he would don his crimson uniform and return to wait on his invalid owner, quietly supporting her household.
After his owners died, he continued to devote himself to the poor, crossing quarantine lines to tend cholera victims and using his money to build an orphanage.
John Cardinal O’Connor says he was a model of faith and should be made a saint, a gesture of the church’s concern for black Catholics. But others in the church say Toussaint was an Uncle Tom and a poor role model for modern blacks.
The Cardinal has told Toussaint supporters, who include some black clergymen, that he plans to demonstrate his enthusiasm this morning in a homily at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Toussaint is buried. As part of Black History Month, the Cardinal is expected to urge Catholics to pray in support of Toussaint’s canonization.
The question is before a commission in Rome. Although there are as many as 1,500 other candidates for sainthood, church insiders consider Toussaint a particular favorite of Pope John Paul II because he would be the perfect Vatican II saint: a layman, a married man, a native of a poor, troubled country and a nonwhite.
Bishop Emerson J. Moore of the New York Archdiocese, one of 11 black Catholic bishops and archbishops in the country, believes Toussaint is just what black Catholics need, particularly when secular heroes like Mike Tyson fall by the wayside. “I think that as Afro-Americans, Haitians, Caribbean-Americans, we need role models like Pierre Toussaint, people of great sanctity who have struggled and kept the faith,” he said.
But what is holiness to some is servility to others.