Religious education for the regeneration of a people: The religious education of African-American Catholics in the nineteenth century

Free black lay Catholics in the nineteenth century took the primary responsibility for Catholic evangelization and religious education of Blacks in the United States. These men and women understood that social responsibility and social action (social justice) were integral to the teaching of Catholic doctrine and piety. They used catechisms authored, selected, or commissioned and approved by local bishops or priest moderators; and focused their instruction not on individual piety but on the regeneration of an entire people. White Catholic priests and bishops, however, who also taught Blacks, did not link evangelization, education, and social action (social justice).;The following questions structured my research: What factors--religious, historical, intellectual, and social--gave rise to a uniquely African-American Catholic vision of religious education? What constituted the nineteenth-century vision of religious education of African-American Catholics? What self-understanding (theological anthropology) is evident in this vision and what incipient ecclesiology characterizes the vision? What is their understanding of the nature and goals of religious education? How and why did the African-American Catholic approach to religious education differ from that of the nineteenth-century white bishops and priests who also taught Blacks? How did the vision of black Catholics converge or differ from what was happening educationally with other nineteenth-century black Christians?;This dissertation aims at a historically contextualized understanding of African-American Catholics in the nineteenth century and their vision of religious education. In this study I examine the historical settings of Blacks in the U.S., the situation of the Catholic Church, and the life and work of African-American Catholics themselves. My research draws on primary archival sources: the letters, papers, conference proceedings and newspaper articles written by and about nineteenth-century black Catholics. From these sources I have reconstructed an African-American Catholic vision of religious education and unveiled the vision's incipient theological anthropology and ecclesiology.