Dear Archbishop Hughes,

Your response to Mrs. Marion Ferreira's letter regarding the ancestry of Henriette Delillle came to my attention, and I shall herewith comment on your letter, interspersing my own remarks with yours. I intend to make this exchange public, as I am a regular contributor to the Interracial Voice website, where thousands of Americans are making their voices heard in outspoken defiance of the racial stereotypes that lock us all in, whether we like it or not.

Allow me to say at once that I am a practicing Roman Catholic and a French Créole descendent on my mother's side. My mother's surname was Trottier de Beaubien, and she was a direct descendent-albeit with a wholesome infusion of African and Native American ancestry-of Michel Trottier de Beaubien, who in 1665-or-so founded the city of Montreal. Your letter to Mrs. Ferreira begins:

Dear Mrs. Ferreira:
Thank you for your letter of October 11, 2002. I note that you raise the question of the current ancestry of Servant of God Henriette Delille.

'Current' ancestry? And just how are we to interpret that? What is being discussed here is the historic ancestry of Mother Delille -- 'current' doesn't even enter into the picture. I believe that you reveal unwittingly the gist of your intentions (stated plainly below) by using the phrase 'current ancestry'. In other words, in order to keep abreast of the times, her real ancestry must be obscured or falsified to fit in with what is today Politically Correct (the 'one-drop rule'). Ergo, 'current ancestry'.

It is not appropriate for me to enter into these questions directly.

Indeed. What, then, is the nature of these questions that makes them so inappropriate in the context of your authority as a source of spiritual and earthly guidance to all of us of the Roman Catholic faith? For the last year, the headlines have been rife with 'inappropriate questions' that the Church has declined to address for altogether too long, and the backlash is already proving itself to be merciless. I think we might, Archbishop Hughes, for the sake of argument, consider these questions 'appropriate'; they certainly are to the Créole people.

I have great confidence in the work of Father Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., of St. Meinrad Archabbey.

As well you might, but he is not being addressed here. We all know that he is a propagandist for the cause of Mother Delille as an 'African American saint', and we dismiss his arguments outright.

When the Church canonizes a saint, she holds up this person as someone who practiced exceptional charity and whose life has a special message for people today.

This is something that every one of us has learned at his mother's knee. But if someone has practiced this exceptional charity in another time and place and under different conditions than our own, this does not automatically mean that we are obliged to take the historical context in which he or she worked and superimpose over it a modern-day matrix in order to understand it. Only the stupid make this kind of requirement. Always and everywhere, people have adjusted to the times in which they lived. Naturally, the times in which Mother Delille lived granted her certain privileges and restricted her in other areas. This does not mean that we have to make her over to suit our modern-day prejudices. Her contribution remains unchallenged, even by time itself.

Henriette Delille will not be raised to the alter [sic, my note: SH] because she was supposedly two-thirds white and was nice to people darker than she.

Henriette Delille was a Créole woman with a splendid little dash of African ancestry, and a great deal of French courage and steadfastness. I find your implication that we Créoles (who ask for her recognition as a Créole) wish her ' to be raised to the altar because she was supposedly two-thirds white and was nice to people darker than she', not only insulting and provocative, but racist in the extreme. What kind of fools do you take us for? Our issue as Créoles is not whether she was two-thirds white or three-quarters white or 15/16 white-as in fact she was. That is the least of our concerns. For that matter, she could just as well have been coal-black, which many proud Créoles were and are! What we're talking about here is her being an outstanding representative of a culture that had deep roots and a long history in a special corner of America, namely Louisiana, that once was FRANCE.

I realize that by using the word 'culture', I am throwing a Molotov cocktail through your front window. Hermann Göring was once heard to say: 'Every time I hear the word "culture", I reach for my gun.' With that in mind, I admit that by bringing up the issue of Mother Delille's culture, I am probably transcending the bounds of what today is usually referred to as 'ethnicity', and usually marches in lock-step with skin color in accordance with our modern American Cyclops view of such things. 'Culture' seems to count for nothing these days, ethnicity is all. But as I implied, what is politically correct today is not necessarily historically correct. Mother Delille was not only of French blood, she was a product of French mores, culture and customs in the New World; in other words, a Créole. A Créole, like a Hispanic, does not have to belong to a particular race; but must embody and represent the culture and the language that he or she has imbibed with his or her mother's milk. And that is what Henriette Delille was, a Créole.

Her language was French, her culture was French. She was born only 6 years after France sold Louisiana to the United States of America. Thus, she grew up in a world where her people, the Free Créoles of Color, lost ground with each new law and regulation that marginalized them and successively degraded them, from the day the French troops began their withdrawal from the Louisiana shores. The Créoles were a people who were forced to watch their birthright and their privileges as full French citizens wither away, even as a Catholic power was succeeded by a Protestant one for whom Christ's mercy did not extend to anyone who was not pure white. In the New World, the Catholic Church -- in Her wisdom, I might add -- almost never made the distinction between so-called 'races' that the good Protestants were all-too-eager to hammer home. If anyone should know that, you, in your position as a Prince of the Church, certainly should.

All over the world and throughout history, peoples who were once proud and free have been betrayed and dispersed and their achievements belittled or stolen from them by powerful enemies who wanted them erased from history. Is Mother Delille's fate to be the same? Is ours as Créoles?

She will be recognized as a blessed because she was a woman of the poor who did not seek to run away from the life of oppression and petty demeaning regulations by "passing as white".

What leads you to assume that she, as a Créole, would have had any good reason to 'pass as white'? The very idea is asinine! What in the world would she have had to gain by it? In a society -- such as the Créole one -- where 'negro blood' was not considered a stain or a taint, there was no reason to deny or hide it. Créoles had their own aristocracy, their own wealth and their own view of 'race', which was altogether at loggerheads with the primitive white-vs-black bigotry of the Anglos. In the deeply French-influenced sphere in which she lived, mixed race was never the issue it later became, nor the issue it has become today. I'm sorry, but 'passing as white' is an Anglo problem, not a Créole one -- never was, never will be. Ask anyone from Latin America or the Caribbean, they'll certainly corroborate what I've said. As for her being a 'woman of the poor', as far as I know she was a woman of some means, certainly sufficient means to keep herself and her Order in respectable circumstances.

As far as her Order is concerned, from its inception it was made up of 'Créole women of good family'. Now that it has become a predominantly African-American Order, it seems as though the sisters want to 'correct' the ethnicity of their Patroness to conform to their own. What I don't understand is why Mother Delille has to be racially classified in the first place. 'Créole' is a cultural designation, whereas 'African American' is an ethnic/racial one. There is a difference, after all, and that is why we Créoles are asking the Church to take into consideration the fact that Mother Delille represents our CULTURE! Race is beside the point.

Because she was a descendant of slaves, she knew how to meet the needs of slaves;

Once again, my dear Archbishop, you are talking twaddle. In the four generations of ancestors who produced Henriette Delille, there was one black slave, one, and a whole baker's dozen of free Frenchman, Spaniards and Italians -- people that the child Henriette knew as 'father', 'grandfather', 'uncle' and 'cousin'. Like other fair-skinned mixed-race people of that time and place, she was probably never confronted outright by racial hatred. After all, she was a middle-class girl born into respectable Créole society who went to good middle-class Créole schools. This isn't Topsy we're talking about here! Furthermore, the implication that it takes a 'descendent of slaves' to know how ' to meet the needs of slaves' is such fatuous, unctuous racist nonsense, that I am appalled. For two millennia now, the saints of the Catholic Church have given aid and succor to people all over the world, people of every tribe, color, caste and persuasion, not just 'their own'. Mother Delille was no different, and to imply that she was only demeans the nature of her sacrifice.

as an illegitimate child, she sought to bring black slaves and free blacks to the sacraments and to a Christian life.

She was not what Anglo-Americans mean when they talk about 'an illegitimate child'. She was a child of plaçage, which -- in the time and place in which she lived -- was an accepted social form (and, I might add, still is today in France; the late Prime Minister Mitterand had a daughter through a kind of 'plaçage' arrangement). That's what I mean about applying a modern-day matrix over historical phenomena; it invariably leads one to the wrong conclusions.

Henriette Delille was a black woman who loved and served the poor in a society where women of her background and ancestry were exploited and despised.

That is complete rubbish. For the first thing, Mother Delille was not black. For the second, she was neither exploited nor despised. Like my own female Créole ancestors (who wielded a good deal of social and economic clout; my great-grandmother Antoinette, for example, was a major landowner in Savannah, Georgia, and had the wealth and power that went with her station), she was revered and respected not only by her own people, the Créoles, but by the few free blacks and the whites of Louisiana -- who, for decades after the French had left, were quite reluctant to get on bad terms with the Créoles who had been their neighbors and fellow-citizens all along. It was the Anglos, particularly the slave-owners and the 'white trash', who hated Créoles for their education, wealth and high-falutin' ways. They insisted on Créoles being classed as negroes, persecuted them for their French culture and their Catholic faith, and instigated no end of contention between them and people of other ethnic groups. Rather as you yourself are doing right now.

Incidentally, as far as I know your authority begins and ends with the interpretation of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. I was not aware that you have been given a mandate to declare who is or is not 'black' or whether or not the Créoles are an 'ethnic group' whose historical credentials meet with your approval. Thus, it would also seem to me that you have grossly overstepped your authority in defining Mother Delille as a member of an ethnic group to which she did not belong. These questions are not by any means 'inappropriate' as you implied above, but on the other hand, your reply to them is downright outrageous and totally unacceptable.

It would indeed be regrettable if a woman who should be a symbol of reconciliation and justice should be turned into a symbol of dissension and internal racial divisions.

That is exactly my point. And that's why I and many other people of Créole or part-Créole ancestry are so vigorously protesting this flagrant historical falsification. A woman of our blood, our history and our ancestry is being taken hostage for political purposes. Like a sacrificial lamb, she is being made to represent a people -- the African-American people -- that she is only barely related to by blood, and not at all related to culturally or historically. We Créoles are the remnant of a culture that once was the jewel of North America, that brought glory to the half-moon that is the Mississippi Delta. All we have is our memories, our history and our pride as a people. Mother Delille is part of that, and no one has the right to take her from us, certainly not on grounds as flimsy, dubious or odious as 'race'.

I ask that you join me in praying for the beatification of Henriette Delille so that she in turn may become a patron for justice, harmony and peace.

I shall pray for the beatification of Henriette Delille, although to the minds of many of us, she is already a patron of justice, harmony and peace. But she is also, irrevocably and for all time, an American-born French Créole. You can bury a lot of things, but never the truth.

Sincerely,
Susanne Heine

Sincerely in the Lord,

Most Reverend Alfred C. Hughes

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