An urgent new chapter in the history of the Catholic Church and America's reckoning with its founding narrative.
In 1838, a group of America's most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their biggest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through more than three centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how slavery enabled the Catholic Church to establish a foothold in Maryland in the eighteenth century and fueled its expansion well into the nineteenth, beginning with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her enslaved descendants passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. Her descendant, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church's money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape. The other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns' reporting in the New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join hundreds of other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.
Swarns' journalism has already begun a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells a bigger story, demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the Catholic Church in America and bringing to light the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.
