The manifestations of racism and its results in the history of Holy Trinity parish have been and are continuing to be examined by Holy Trinity’s history committee. The following essay is an attempt at comparative history.
There are similarities and parallels in the histories of a number of parishes in the District of Columbia and the segment of Virginia which had been part of the district from 1790 to 1846. African American parishioners offended by the fact that they were not treated as equal members of the Body of Christ withdrew from a number of Washington area Catholic Churches and founded their own Catholic parishes where they could worship without being subjected to demeaning treatment.
The first of these stories of exclusion, exodus, and rebirth occurred in 1858. In that year, free Black Catholics repelled by the racism they experienced at St. Matthew’s, where they were forced to attend Mass in the basement, founded Martin de Porres, the first Black Catholic parish in the District of Columbia. According to St. Augustine’s parish history, “Faced with a society that was not yet willing to put off the last vestiges of slavery and a Church that, at best, tolerated the presence of Black people in its congregation, these men and women founded a Catholic school and chapel on 15th Street under the patronage of Blessed Martin de Porres.”
The parish was re-dedicated in 1876 to St. Augustine, and in 1908 the parish school, which had been forced to close in 1885, reopened under the direction of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first religious order of Black Catholic women. It was that order which Anne Marie Becraft, Holy Trinity’s pioneering promoter of education for Black children, joined in 1831 when she was 26. St. Augustine’s, today, proudly calls itself the mother church of Black Catholics in the United States.
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