Christmas Dinner and Religious Controversy:
What could go better together?
Register for our December 14 dinner and meeting:
The Mission Room, Mission San Luis
Free to members; non-members $10 each (because we have to pay for the turkey; of course, guests can always join at the door and get in for free)
Dinner at 5:30 pm; Program at 6:00 pm
WE SUPPLY THE MEAT AND DRINK; YOU BRING THE SIDES, SALADS, DESSERTS, ETC. LET US KNOW WHEN YOU REGISTER WHAT WE CAN LOOK FORWARD TO FROM YOU.
Program “Papists and Heretics in Post Civil War Florida”
Speaker: Barbara Mattick, Public Historian Emerita, Division of Historic Resources, and author of:
Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University Press of America).
Florida was a battleground between lots of groups: Native Americans and Europeans, Spanish and French, and then Spanish and British, but also, from 1564 onward, between Catholics and Protestants. Barbara Mattick will tell the very moving story of a conclave of French Catholic nuns who came to St. Augustine at the end of Civil War to teach the formerly enslaved African-Americans. Dealing with racism, ignorance, yellow fever epidemics, and worst of all, Protestants (the Protestant American Missionary Association), the Sisters expanded the Catholic presence in Florida and Georgia by efforts that contrasted with efforts by most White, Protestant churches to endorse slavery by another name. It would not be until the 1950s that denominations like the Baptists and Presbyterians endorsed school integration, and some never did. In the aftermath of the war, the Sisters established elite academies and free schools in a society that had never had public education, created orphanages and combatted anti-Catholicism. The Sisters not only fought racial stereotypes, they also reinforced the protestant concept of domesticity in Catholic terms. So what you have is a study of race, gender and religion. No hot button issues there.
Join us on Thursday night, December 14, to hear this fascinating story.