Ven. Henriette Delille

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Venerable Henriette Delille overcame great opposition to establish the second religious community for black women in the United States. She was an octroon born in New Orleans in 1813. Her mother was a kept woman within the plaçage system. After Henriette learned the truth about marriage she became implacably opposed to the plaçage system, and she rejected the trajectory of her life. In her 20s she started the second religious community for black women, but it took years for the authorities to approve her religious order. Since its founding in the 1840s the community has opened the first Catholic nursing home for the elderly in the United States, as well as one of the oldest Black Catholic high schools in the USA. Henriette Delille died in 1862. Her cause for canonization opened in 1988, and she was declared venerable in 2010.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic history brought to you by the support of listeners like you.
0:11.8	If you like our podcast, please become a supporter.
0:15.0	Also, be sure to rate us and give us a review wherever you get your podcasts.
0:20.4	I'm Noelle Heister Crowe. And I'm Tom Crow.
0:22.7	Today we're talking about venerable Henriette DeLille. She was an incredibly brave woman who
0:29.6	bucked the strong social trends of her time and place and eventually founded the second
0:35.0	religious order for black women in the United States.
0:39.0	Henriette de Lille was born a free woman of color in New Orleans in 1813, and her mother was a
0:45.1	kept woman. She lived her life within the placage system.
0:49.3	Placege is an important part of this story, so we're going to spend some time talking about that.
0:54.5	Yes. Now, there is much to this story that is ugly and unfortunate, and the plesage system
1:00.1	was a big part of that. Plasage was sort of an outgrowth of slavery. Some female slaves managed
1:05.6	to become free women of color. It wasn't easy to gain this liberty in the first place,
1:10.3	but it was possible.
1:11.8	One of the ways it happened was through the death of their owner. Another was through
1:16.4	purchasing their freedom. Either another person put up the money or the woman herself somehow
1:21.2	amassed enough money to purchase her own freedom. But once a female slave became a free woman
1:27.1	of color, there wasn't really a whole
1:29.0	lot she could do to support herself in such a society. One life available to her was to enter into
1:34.8	this plesage system. Placege was a practice wherein wealthy white men kept a mistress who lived
1:42.5	in his big house in the city. These women were not their wives.
1:46.9	The wives and legitimate children lived at the plantation out in the countryside, but these women
	...

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