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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Jul 8, 2023 11:59:55 GMT -5
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Post by Crucis#1 on Jul 8, 2023 20:14:35 GMT -5
Fresh Air interview by Terry Gross, with the author of the 272, Rachel Swarns. Insights into Thomas Mulledy while at Georgetown. The inexcusable actions of Thomas Mulledy and his lack of consideration and compassion are noted. www.npr.org/transcripts/1181767635A 42 minute interview that all alumni of Holy Cross should listen. There is a very dark part of the Catholic Church's history that has only recently come to the attention of the public. For more than a century, the church financed its expansion and its institutions with the profits from the enslaved people the church bought and sold. Without the enslaved, the Catholic Church in the United States as we know it today would not exist, writes my guest, Rachel Swarns. She says the priests prayed for the salvation of the souls of the people they owned, even as they bought and sold their bodies. In 1838, the Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people, which helped save what is now Georgetown University from bankruptcy and helped stabilize the Jesuits in Maryland. In 2016, Swarns wrote an article, published on the front page of the New York Times, headlined "272 Slaves Were Sold To Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?" Rachel Swarns' new book expands on that article and tells the story of the church's history of enslavement in America while illustrating the consequences by focusing on generations of one family that had several members among those 272 people sold by the church in 1838. Two descendants of the family she writes about in the book found each other as a result of her New York Times article. She was a reporter at the Times for 22 years and is now a contributing writer on race and race relations. She directs the New York University initiative "Hidden Legacies: Slavery, Race And The Making Of The 21st Century." Her new book is titled "The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved And Sold To Build The American Catholic Church." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_F._Mulledy
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Jul 9, 2023 8:43:25 GMT -5
The Jesuits were suppressed in France oin the 1760s, as a direct consequence of their ownership of large plantations in the West Indies, where thousands of enslaved people labored in the production of sugar cane and other agricultural products. On its plantations in the West Indies, the province of France had at least 1800 slaves. The total in South America, Central America, and North america (Maryland province) was at least 25,000 in 1760. See tabulation in Journal of Jesuit Studies brill.com/view/journals/jjs/8/1/article-p37_37.xml?language=enThe province of France basically engaged in a commercial enterprise. This was done to underwrite the educational system that the Jesuits had created in northern France, centered on Paris. This came undone when, during a war with France, the British navy captured a small sleet of ships carrying Jesuit-owned cargoes from the West Indies to France, These cargoes were under contract, and the Jesuits were treated by the courts as a commercial enterprise, not as a religious society engaged in charitable endeavors. It is said of the greatest of their schools, the Lycee Louis le Grand (in Paris), there would have been no French revolution without Louis le Grand. Voltaire and Robespierre were graduates, as was the Marquis de Sade. (Louis le Grand remains a very prestigious school in France., Emmanuel Macron is a graduate.) In the early 1800s, the Jesuits moved enslaved people from the Maryland Province to the Missouri Province. www.pbs.org/newshour/education/at-least-200-people-were-enslaved-by-the-jesuits-in-st-louis-descendants-are-now-telling-their-stories
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Jul 9, 2023 8:51:57 GMT -5
If you explore enough on the internet you’ll find that for every ill of society one or more commentators hold the Jesuits responsible.
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Post by rgs318 on Jul 9, 2023 10:08:53 GMT -5
While well aware of the injury and injustice of slavery for any enslaved people, statements saying that "Without the enslaved, the Catholic Church in the United States as we know it today would not exist" is more of a personal opinion than fact. It seems as though, to the author of this statement, the many men and women who dedicated their lives to the Church played little or no role at all.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Jul 9, 2023 11:08:27 GMT -5
If you explore enough on the internet you’ll find that for every ill of society one or more commentators hold the Jesuits responsible. Including the vitriolic calumnies heaped on them by a French abbe in Boston, whose pastoral action in Boston at the end of the War for American Independence ultimately led to the naming of the College of the Holy Cross (derived from L' Eglise de Sainte-Croix) I could teach a semester-long course on case studies of the end justifying the means. Without the Enlightenment, fostered in part be Jesuit schools such as Louis le Grand, would we still be living in an Age of Kings? Fine by me, provided that one branch of the tree was still to the manor (or manner) born!!
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Jul 9, 2023 11:34:37 GMT -5
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Post by newfieguy74 on Jul 9, 2023 12:48:20 GMT -5
I just came back from spending two weeks in Ireland, and I can tell you that many Irish have not forgotten the ills inflicted on the country by the British. The comments were often understated but there's a scar. What we sometimes hear called "the Great Potato Famine" is often called there "the Great Hunger" or a genocide. Over and over I heard that there was plenty of food, but it was taken by the British. It was also typical at many historic sites to hear how a structure was damaged by the British. I heard Cromwell's name invoked a number of times, never favorably. As far as I know my ancestors, most from Cork, left Ireland about the time of "the Great Hunger".
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Post by td128 on Jul 9, 2023 13:37:44 GMT -5
The British Crown? Friends like that, who needs enemies. The Crown - current day globalist elites - made every effort to eliminate the Irish race including many ancestors of fellow Crusaders. For those not aware of the British inhumanity to the Irish, read this and weep. www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/mayo-villages-death-famine
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Post by hcpride on Jul 9, 2023 15:26:02 GMT -5
Maybe Georgetown could help Catholic Irish Americans collect reparations from the descendants of 17th century Cromwell supporters and descendants of 19th century English landlords. Those two groups of descendants could pay these reparations from reparations they in turn collect from descendants of Roman overlords, Viking raiders, and Norman knights.
Might take a bit of time, but the Jesuits could leverage a percentage of the Cromwell/Landlord descendant reparations to pay descendants of particular Native Americans and African Americans who suffered at the hands of Jesuits two or three centuries ago in North America.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Jul 9, 2023 17:01:54 GMT -5
The Irish have done pretty well in this country thanks to their hard work and innate talents. No reparations are needed. I like the old trite saying “living well is the best revenge”.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Jul 9, 2023 21:15:00 GMT -5
An early 20th Century census record lists my paternal grandmother as being born in Austria, of Austrian nationality. I know her schooling was in German. She emigrated to the United States at the age of 14, without any family members. Why? Perhaps because she and her family lived and worked on the vast estates of a Prince. (I can't remember his name.) There was no local government, no regional government. This was a feudal system still extant into the 20th Century, in which the peasants, serfs. laborers who toiled away on this estate (read fief) had no rights, and ultimately, no future other than decades and generations of toil (unless they left).
My maternal grandfather's family were tenant farmers near Kinsale, more particularly near the Old Head of Kinsale, and had been such for generations. The lands which they rented were owned by the Baron de Courcy, the senior baron in the Irish peerage. My maternal grandfather never knew that my maternal grandmother was ancestrally related to the first de Courcy, who had accompanied William the Conqueror on the Conquest. The first de Courcy's younger brother was Richard de Neville. named for his fief at Neuville-sur-Touques in Normandy. Richard de Neville was also a companion of William the Conqueror on the Conquest.
In 1070, the Pope directed William the Conqueror to build a great abbey as penance for having killed so many English. (The only standard that flew above the vessels of the Norman armada crossing the Channel was the papal standard, even though the English, led by King Harold were also Catholic.) The abbey would become the Battle Abbey, constructed at Hastings. The penance was not imposed because William had killed too many English knights and soldiers at Hastings, but rather for the genocide on 1069-1070, known as the Harrying of the North.
Contemporary accounts stated that about 100,000 perished in William's campaign. As a percentage of the existing population at the time, the number of deaths were comparable to those in the Holocaust nearly a thousand years later. It seems that at the forefront of William's forces in carrying out this campaign were those of de Neville. Family-commissioned genealogies generally skip past the period between 1066 and 1170.)
In 1176, Alan de Neville died. He was chief forester for Henry II, the first of the Plantagenets. As chief forester, he administered about 30 percent of the land area of England for the King, and the King's treasury. From the chronicles, he was not a nice man, He was vexatious, cruel, and efficient. He was twice excommunicated by Thomas a Becket. The excommunication would be lifted, provided he went on a Crusade, and also visited with the Pope on the way. However, there were no crusades before his death. He wished to be buried at the Battle Abbey. Still excommunicated, under canon law he could not be buried on consecrated ground. Little matter, the Benedictine monks of the Battle Abbey agreed to bury him there.
That is until Henry II intervened, telling the monks, 'I will have his money. You can have his body. the demons in hell will have his soul.' Scholars have asked why Alan de Neville wanted to buried at the Battle Abbey. He had not fought at Hastings. There were numerous other abbeys in England. Scholars have suggested the monks thought they would be richly compensated for the burial. I think Alan de Neville's choice was based on the de Neville's having helped pay for its construction a century before; their penance as well.
Sobering to think how much life is a roll of the dice. What if my ancestor, Charles Martel, loses at Tours? What if my paternal grandfather decided to follow the footsteps of his older brother and return to then Russia after emigrating to the United States?
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Post by sader1970 on Jul 10, 2023 6:37:06 GMT -5
What if? What if?!!! We wouldn’t be graced by your presence here! 😢
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Jul 10, 2023 7:54:00 GMT -5
What if? What if?!!! We wouldn’t be graced by your presence here! 😢 Or there might be a mosque on College Hill.
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Post by newfieguy74 on Jul 13, 2023 11:30:53 GMT -5
"Sobering to think how much life is a roll of the dice. What if my ancestor, Charles Martel, loses at Tours? What if my paternal grandfather decided to follow the footsteps of his older brother and return to then Russia after emigrating to the United States?"
I often watch Henry Louis Gates show Finding Your Roots and I think of how many choices, coincidences, setbacks, and triumphs have to take place for us all to be in existence and where we ended up. It also makes me realize how many people--most people--are some serendipitous stew of ancestry.
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Post by Chu Chu on Jul 13, 2023 14:14:06 GMT -5
"Sobering to think how much life is a roll of the dice. What if my ancestor, Charles Martel, loses at Tours? What if my paternal grandfather decided to follow the footsteps of his older brother and return to then Russia after emigrating to the United States?" I often watch Henry Louis Gates show Finding Your Roots and I think of how many choices, coincidences, setbacks, and triumphs have to take place for us all to be in existence and where we ended up. It also makes me realize how many people--most people--are some serendipitous stew of ancestry. Yes! Love Henry Louis Gates and Finding Your Roots
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Post by rgs318 on Jul 14, 2023 7:18:26 GMT -5
I like Gates and his show, especially now that it features people other than just those with ancestors who were slave owners or slaves. Diversity is good.
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Post by Chu Chu on Jul 14, 2023 11:17:11 GMT -5
I like Gates and his show, especially now that it features people other than just those with ancestors who were slave owners or slaves. Diversity is good. The problem is, they keep popping up, often when unexpected, as the archivists investigate back in time. Kinda the point, really.
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Post by ndgradbuthcfan on Jul 14, 2023 17:03:21 GMT -5
I like Gates and his show, especially now that it features people other than just those with ancestors who were slave owners or slaves. Diversity is good. My wife and I watch his show regularly. Of course, the African American guests have ancestors who were slaves, almost always. S. Epatha Merkenson (from Law and Order) is a good example. Her ancestors include those who were sold by the Georgetown Jesuits. While a very few of the other guests have had slave holding ancestors, it was never the case that Gates went out of his way to profile just them.
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Post by rgs318 on Jul 14, 2023 18:13:51 GMT -5
If you check back on the guests for his two years, his selections would make that seem to be the case. His show is worth watching.
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Post by mm67 on Jul 14, 2023 19:33:07 GMT -5
Dr. Gates is a historian .Finding Your Roots" provides a wonderful entre to learn the events of a place and past time in a very personal context. It is a wonderful way to learn our history as a nation - an extended biography of ancestors & of America in all its pain & joy. I've learned a lot.
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Post by alum on Feb 5, 2024 10:44:08 GMT -5
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Feb 5, 2024 13:55:15 GMT -5
They are doing a DNA test to see whether the degree of relationship, if any. Unfortunately, they are apparently using Ancestry DNA. I have a first cousin once removed who took an Ancestry DNA test. She was subsequently contacted by a woman who said her stepfather was the uncle of this cousin. Really?!?! (He wasn't, but that's a longer story.) My cousin had never done a family tree on Ancestry, just took the DNA test. I asked my cousin to send me the list of all the relatives Ancestry identified as being related to her. When I reviewed the list there were some names that I recognized; numerous others that I didn't. One name in particular was of an English woman. I found her in the very extensive tree of someone who traces her ancestry through both the English House of Neville, and the minor branch, the Irish barony in County Wexford. So I immediately knew that Ancestry supposedly found a DNA match on the Neville side of my family. There was one slight problem. This English woman had died circa 1850, and they would have had to exhume the body to obtain a DNA sample. (In Game of Thrones, the House of Lannister is loosely based on the House of Neville, and the [duplicitous] 16th Earl of Warwick.) This is like ChatGPT hallucinating about Tony Fauci meeting Albert Einstein. DNA sampling on 23andMe makes no such hallucinatory connections. I used 23andMe. The matches it periodically returns are almost entirely third or fourth cousins, without identification of which ancestor we have in common.
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Post by Chu Chu on Feb 5, 2024 14:20:24 GMT -5
The article in the Smithsonian Magazine is amazing. I think that every HC alum should read it.
I thought I knew a lot about the Healy family, but I had no idea about how Patrick and James felt about their mixed race, and how they navigated the world around them. I also do not remember learning that it was the fortune amassed from selling the family slaves that rebuilt Fenwick Hall after the fire.
Although the author talked about several of the Healy siblings, something not mentioned in the article (that is well-known here on the West Coast), is the history behind the United States Coast Guard Cutter Healy. USCGC Healy is the United States' largest and most technologically advanced icebreaker, as well as the US Coast Guard's largest vessel. It is named in honor of Captain Michael A. Healy, who is yet another famous Healy brother. She is home ported in Seattle, and was commissioned in 1999.
The achievements of this family of children, born into slavery, are truly astounding.
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Post by Crucis#1 on Feb 5, 2024 15:40:09 GMT -5
www.holycross.edu/faith-service/mcfarland-center-religion-ethics-and-culture/events-mcfarland-centerWednesday, March 20, 2024
7:30 p.m., Hogan Ballroom, Hogan Campus Center Rachel Swarms Rachel Swarns' The 272 follows the harrowing story of the people who were enslaved by the Jesuits and whose families were torn apart in 1838 when they were sold to help support the growth of the Catholic Church in the United States. United by Swarns’ reporting in 2016, their descendants have pressed these institutions to make amends and break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America. Following a brief presentation about the book and the relationship of the sale of those enslaved families to the development of Holy Cross, President Vincent D. Rougeau and Jesuit Provincial Joseph M. O'Keefe, S.J., '76 will join Swarns in a discussion about what this says about Holy Cross's mission and obligations today. Rachel L. Swarns, associate professor of journalism at New York University, was a New York Times reporter and correspondent for 22 years. Her work on Jesuits and slavery touched off a national conversation about American universities and their ties to this painful period of history. The 272, published by Random House in June, was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time Magazine and The Washington Post.
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