Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Peter Queen was severed from his family at least five times throughout his life. Born enslaved in Maryland, as a teenager Peter and his family were forced away from kin at the Jesuits’ White Marsh plantation to the Jesuit mission in Florissant, Missouri, in 1829. Young Peter certainly resented the exploitation that he and his family endured at the seminary, and many of his kin entered into altercations with the Jesuits, protesting the violence, psychological abuse, family separation, arduous labor, and abysmal living conditions they endured daily. In 1830, the Jesuit superior claimed that Peter had threatened to kill him (though no other Jesuit had witnessed the alleged threat) and ordered that Peter be sold.

“His poor parents…constantly lament his loss, and the people are far from being happy and satisfied,” (Schmidt and Ali, 2021) wrote another Jesuit. In their grief, Peter’s parents never relented in pushing Jesuit leadership to have him returned. For two years, the superior wrote, Peter’s parents “never stopped asking me to purchase” him. Their constant persistence eventually “forced” the Jesuits to buy Peter back, but remaining with his family was never guaranteed.

In 1843, Peter married Marian, who was enslaved on a neighboring property. They had three children: Elizabeth (1845), Gabriel (1847), and Thomas William (1849). However, six months after Thomas’s birth, the Jesuits punished Peter again by selling him 325 miles away to the Jesuit-run St. Joseph College in Bardstown, Kentucky. Peter left $10, perhaps all he had, for Marian to support their family in his absence.

A few weeks after his sale, Peter escaped, likely to return to his family or to obtain freedom for himself and the means to liberate his wife and children. The Jesuits advertised a reward for Peter’s “apprehension and safe confinement in the Bardstown jail,” and indeed Peter was soon captured and imprisoned. The Jesuits decided to further punish Peter by selling him even farther away to the arduous toil of the Deep South, where the possibility of escape and reunion with his family was nearly impossible. He may never have seen his family again. Marian, like many enslaved women, raised their young children not knowing whether their father was alive or safe, or whether they would one day lose her as well.

Peter, Elizabeth, Gabriel, and Thomas Queen were a few of the hundreds of thousands of children severed from their families by members of the Catholic Church in the Americas during the era of chattel slavery. The heart-wrenching accounts are too numerous to relay here, and those that survive in the historical record are just a fraction of the whole.

Church institutions technically had regulations against severing enslaved families but regularly disregarded them. Catholic leadership forbade breaking up families through sale, except in extraordinary situations, such as the threat of violence or persistent immoral behavior. However, what constituted “family” within these precepts was narrow: spouses married within the Church could not be separated from one another nor dependent children be removed from their parents. This meant Catholics could justify separating “older” children from their parents, such as when the Jesuits sold teenaged Peter Queen, wrenched 10-year-old Josephine Harris from her parents and six siblings by gifting her to a colleague, and separated 11-year-old Mary Queen from her parents and siblings to labor on another Jesuit property, where she died a year later. These regulations did not stop Catholic enslavers from severing immediate families regularly, using excuses about financial and personnel needs or enslaved people’s behavior. Other times, they separated families merely on their whim. The Religious of the Sacred Heart had few qualms about selling the wife of Edmond, whom they enslaved, away from him when they deemed her disobedient; their primary hesitation was that it might make Edmond act out as well.

Moreover, when buying and selling people Catholic enslavers did not recognize what constituted family to enslaved Africans and Indigenous people in their cultural contexts. Extended kin networks, already important in African and Indigenous cultures, continually evolved in bondage, extending beyond direct blood ties as families were broken and recreated. Motivated to overcome the many disruptions to their lives—their forced removal from homelands, their sale from regions that had become familiar, and the fragility of family ties—enslaved people worked to sustain robust extended family networks and form fictive kinships with fellow people of African descent, both enslaved and free. 

This history of family separation has persisted, continuing to impact Black and Indigenous family lives today. Seeking a better life for himself and his family but instead separated from his wife and children, imprisoned, and sold, Peter Queen’s story strongly parallels and in many ways presages that of the disproportionate number of African Americans, especially men, incarcerated today as a result of the structural racism that has its roots in race-based slavery, leaving children to be raised by single parents, grandparents, extended family, or orphaned. Historian Vanessa M. Holden describes this reality:

“African Americans confront these realities daily: Black families are separated by the bond and bail system, incarceration, the child welfare system, and the criminalization of poverty. All can lead to family separation and the loss of one’s children. Child welfare advocates also recognize the link between the disproportionate number of Black children in the foster care system and the pipeline from foster care to prison. All of these contemporary systems of power are echoes of legal and social structures that devalued enslaved parents and profited from enslaved children during American slavery.” (Holden, 2018)

New initiatives by Catholic institutions and descendant communities in the United States have, to varying degrees, sought to repair some of these harms, recognizing how the severing of enslaved families supported the expansion and flourishing of Catholic institutions in the growing nation while causing severe and lasting trauma and damage for enslaved families and their descendants. Genealogical initiatives work to enable descendants to recover these submerged stories about their ancestors and to reunite with a large extended family network of cousins across the globe. This is especially important when the Church is the keeper of the sacramental records and other accounts that document these family ties. Repair work has centered on closing the racial wealth gap wherein intentional and structural measures that prevent access to capital as well as break down the Black family have hindered many African American families from accumulating and bequeathing generational wealth. Educational opportunities (e.g., preferential admissions options) and measures to provide funds and facilities for elderly care take into account the ways generations of African Americans have been barred by systemic inequities from being able to provide support for their elders and developmental opportunities for their children.

Although reparative initiatives are underway, true reconciliation between the Church and those harmed by slavery will only come about if it includes a sincere examination of the Church’s teaching on the family. Western cultural expressions of family with a mother and father have been ensconced as the ideal with a myopia that simultaneously degrades family realities that may be broader–not bound by blood relationships which constrain the nuclear family model. Subverting racist structures that systematically shatter families, those who were held in slavery and their descendants have found ways to construct kinship networks through extended family, community connections, or sacramental bonds as godparents. The Church must work to legitimize these families that do not fit “the ideal.” Reflecting on the Synod on the Family, Pope Francis stated, "There is no stereotype of the ideal family, but rather a challenging mosaic made up of many different realities, with all their joys, hopes and problems." (Pope Francis, 2016)

The Church must continue to follow the lead of Pope Francis who has affirmed the nourishing love found in the “larger family.” He explains, "The nuclear family needs to interact with the wider family made up of parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even neighbors." (Pope Francis, 2019)
The Holy Father recalls that Jesus himself “did not grow up in a narrow and stifling relationship with Mary and Joseph, but readily interacted with the wider family, the relatives of his parents and their friends.” Returning to Scripture and Tradition reveals possibilities for the Church to live the Gospel more authentically while affirming the family structures of those who carry the generational effects of family separation. The Church has encouraged models of family that are non-nuclear, namely, in religious life where members of a congregation call one another brother and sister and are taught to think of each other as such. This is rooted in the Gospel itself as Jesus commands his disciples to abandon family for the sake of the Kingdom of God. According to Christ’s teaching and the subsequent Pauline and Johannine traditions, blood ties no longer have the same meaning for the Christian who has risen to a new identity as a child of God.  

Where the sin of racism has damaged the family, the Gospel calls the Church to mercy. Rather than cast judgment upon families that don’t reflect the ideal of the nuclear household, we as Catholics must eradicate the systemic harms that continue to inhibit Black and brown families’ efforts to remain intact. Pope Francis asks us to consider the dilemmas that an impoverished single mother faces: “In such difficult situations of need, the Church must be particularly concerned to offer understanding, comfort, and acceptance, rather than imposing straightaway a set of rules that only lead people to feel judged and abandoned by the very Mother called to show them God’s mercy."(Pope Francis, 2016) 
With mercy, the Church must acknowledge the struggle of enslaved people and their descendants to maintain a sense of family against racist systems perpetuated by the Church and its members.

Kelly L. Schmidt serves as Reparative Public Historian at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in the history and legacies of enslavement in the context of U.S. Catholicism, as well as in addressing institutional entanglements with slavery, particularly among higher education and religious institutions.

Kevin Kuehl is Immigrant and Refugee Ministry Coordinator for six parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. He graduated with a degree in Culture and Politics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and holds an M.A. in Ministry from Creighton University and a certificate in philosophy from Saint Louis University.