Rosemont College proudly honors Five Luminous Women of God in celebration of Women History Month. From March 11 – 31, 2026, the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception will feature a special exhibit honoring five courageous women on the road to sainthood. This inspiring display invites students, faculty, staff, and visitors to reflect on faith, justice, and leadership.

The Five Luminous Women of God exhibit highlights Julia Greeley, Henriette Delille, Venerable Mary Lange, Thea Bowman, and Dorothy Day. Each woman demonstrated extraordinary courage in the face of injustice. Taken together, their lives span more than 200 years, from 1784 to 1990. Pay a visit to the chapel to see portraits of these five extraordinary women and learn their stories.

Two of these women were descendants of enslaved people, and one was herself enslaved until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865. All five confronted the evils of racism and segregation. One was born in Cuba and later immigrated to the United States, while the others lived and served in cities including Baltimore, New Orleans, Denver, Jackson, and New York.

Visitors to the Chapel will encounter thoughtfully designed posters that share the stories of these remarkable women. Each narrative reveals a commitment to mercy, justice, and systemic change. Together, their witness forms a powerful testimony to faith in action.

Honoring Women of Courage & Faith

The Five Luminous Women of God stood against injustice in both personal and public ways. They served the poor, educated children, organized communities, and advocated for racial equality. Their efforts addressed immediate needs while also challenging broader systems of inequality.

All five women are currently candidates for sainthood in the Catholic Church. Their causes reflect lives marked by holiness, sacrifice, and transformative service. Rosemont College recognizes their example as especially meaningful during Women History Month.

Students who visit the exhibit will gain more than historical knowledge. They will encounter models of moral leadership rooted in courage and compassion. The exhibit encourages reflection on how faith can inspire action in today’s world.

Journey to Sainthood

Taken together, their lives span more than 200 years, from 1784—1990. Two were descendents of slaves (Bowman, Delille) and another was herself enslaved (Greeley). All of them knew the evils of segregation and racism. One (Lange) was born in Cuba and immigrated with her family to the US, while the other four were American-born, living chiefly in Baltimore, New Orleans, Denver, Jackson, and New York. Each, in her own way, stood against the inhumanity of racism in her time and place, laboring to heal the wounds of segregation and inequality by direct acts of mercy and the hard work of systemic change.

Three are called “servants of God” (Bowman, Day, Greeley) having just begun the Church’s process for declaring one of its members a saint; two have advanced to the next stage and are called “venerable” (Lange, DeLille) With courage, creativity, and extraordinary love these colorful women have lived the gospel of Jesus Christ, embodied in the blessings of the beatitudes —

blessed are you who are poor

blessed are you who hunger now

blessed are you who weep

blessed are you when people hate you,

when they exclude you, reject you, insult you

and reject your name as evil

Luke 6: 20-23

Venerable Mary Lange (1784 – 1882)

Not much is known about Elizabeth Lange’s early life, but recent research points to Santiago de Cuba as her birthplace. Most likely she grew up in the French speaking area of the city. Because she was well educated, it is thought that she probably came from a family of some means and social standing. In the early1800’s young Elizabeth and her family left Cuba to seek peace and security in the United States where great influxes of French-speaking Catholic refugees from the Haitian Revolution were settling.

By 1813 Elizabeth Lange was living in Baltimore. It did not take her long to recognize that the children of her fellow Caribbean immigrants needed education. She was determined to respond to that need even though she was a black woman in a slave state long before the Emancipation Proclamation. She used her own money and home to educate children of color. With a friend, Marie Magdelaine Balas, Lange offered free education to children in their home in the Fells Point area of the city.

Early in 1828 a priest of the diocese, Reverend James Joubert, S.S., presented Lange with the challenge to start a school for girls of color.

Joubert’s invitation felt to her like the call she had been waiting for, to commit her life to God and the service of others in need. She then suggested to Father Joubert that they should start a women’s religious community too. He felt it was a very worthwhile idea, and agreed to provide the direction, solicit financial assistance and encourage other women of color to become members of this, the first religious community of women of African heritage. And so the congregation of the “Oblates Sisters of Providence” began.

Cause for Canonization: https://www.motherlange.org/mother-lange

“We believe our Oblate vocation calls and enables us to embrace all people equally with dignity and respect, free from any form of prejudice, discrimination or distrust.”

Oblates’ Credal Statement

Historian Shannen Dee Williams calls Lange “a prophetic witness for our church,” and assesses her achievement in this way:

Lange’s extraordinary journey in our church illuminates the often-erased African foundations of American Catholicism, the transnational dimensions of African American Catholicism, and the central roles that Black women and girls played in the making of U.S. Catholicism—especially the tradition free from the most virulent aspects of white supremacy …. Lange and her Oblate Sisters of Providence thus also serve as the essential counterpoints to anyone who dares attempt to defend or excuse their slaveholding and segregationist peers, including recognized saints, as “people of their times.” Their story offers

the searing reminder that Lange and her sisters were also people of those times …. That Lange was able to establish the modern world’s first Roman Catholic sisterhood freely open to African-descended women and girls in the slave society of the United States of America and the religious institution most responsible for the rise of African slavery in the Americas was the first miracle she performed.

Venerable Henriette Delille (1813 – 1862)

This means colored women “in concubinage” with wealthy white men. In funeral records found recently, it appears that Henriette gave birth to two sons who died before the age of three.

When Henriette was 24 years old, she underwent a religious experience, which she expressed in a brief declaration of faith and love. On the flyleaf of a book centered on the Eucharist, is a profession of love, in her own handwriting. Written in French: “Je crois en Dieu. J’espère en Dieu. J’aime. Je v[eux] vivre et mourir pour Dieu.”

[Translation]: I believe in God. I hope in God. I love [God]. I w[ant] to live and die for God.

In 1836 Henriette drew up the rules and regulations for devout Christian women, which would eventually become the Society of the Holy Family. The group was founded for the purpose of nursing the sick, caring for the poor, and instructing the ignorant. The sisters took into their home elderly women who needed more than visitation, and thereby opened America’s first Catholic home of its kind for the elderly, as recorded in the National Register of Historic Places. Especially noteworthy are the heroic efforts of the early Sisters who cared for the sick and the dying during the yellow fever epidemics that struck New Orleans in 1853 and 1897.

In her obituary it is written that, “ . . . (Henriette) devoted herself untiringly for many years, without reserve, to the religious instruction of the people of New Orleans, principally of slaves. . . .” The last line of her obituary reads, “. . . for the love of Jesus Christ she had become the humble and devout servant of the slaves.”

Venerable Henriette Delille is the first United States native born African-American whose cause for canonization has been officially opened by the Catholic Church, and founder of the second oldest surviving congregation of African-American religious.

Servant of God Julia Greeley (1833 – 1918)

Julia Greeley, Denver’s Angel of Charity, was born into slavery, near Hannibal, Missouri. While she was still a young child, a cruel slave master, in the course of beating her mother, caught Julia’s right eye with his whip and destroyed it. Freed by Missouri’s Emancipation Act in 1865, Julia subsequently earned her keep by serving white families in Missouri, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico—mostly in the Denver area.

Whatever she did not need for herself, Julia spent assisting poor families in her neighborhood. When her own resources were inadequate, she begged for food, fuel and clothing. One writer later called her a “one-person St. Vincent de Paul Society.” To avoid embarrassing the people she helped, Julia did most of her charitable work under cover of night through dark alleys.

Julia entered the Catholic Church at Sacred Heart Parish in Denver in 1880, and was an outstanding supporter of all that the parish had to offer. The Jesuits who ran the parish considered her the most enthusiastic promoter of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus they had ever seen. Every month she visited on foot every fire station in Denver and delivered literature of the Sacred Heart League to the firemen, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

A daily communicant, Julia had a rich devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin and continued her prayers while working and moving about. She joined the Secular Franciscan Order in 1901 and was active in it till her death in 1918.

As she lived in a boarding house, Julia’s body was laid out in church, and immediately many hundreds of people began filing past her coffin to pay their grateful respect. She was buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and for nearly a century many people asked that her cause for canonization be considered, a request which was finally granted in the Fall of 2016.

Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897 – 1980)

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Dorothy grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and Chicago. Her early life was marked by a passion for writing and an acute sense of social justice. She began studies at the University of Illinois, but left to pursue her dreams as a writer. In New York City, Day worked as a journalist on socialist newspapers, participated in protest movements, and developed friendships with artists and writers. She also went through failed love affairs, a suicide attempt, and an abortion — experiences she drew upon in writing a novel.

During the bohemian years, the young Day came face to face with an emptiness, a loneliness that she later recognized as a longing for God. When Hollywood producers purchased the rites to Day’s novel, she bought a small seaside cottage on Staten Island. There she lived happily with her partner, Forster Batterham. However, Batterham rejected both marriage and religion, while Day grew increasingly attracted to the Catholic Church as “the Church of the poor.” When she gave birth to a daughter in 1926, in her great joy Day turned to God in gratitude. Her faith took root. As she later described in her spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness, her decision to have her daughter Tamar baptized, and then to enter the Church herself, led to the end of her common law marriage.

At first, Day struggled to find her place as a Catholic. While covering the hunger march in Washingtobn, D.C., at age 35, she lamented the absence of the Church, which she felt should have been at the forefront of the march. At the National Shrine, she wrote later, “I offered up a special prayer, a prayer that came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.” The next day she met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant, who introduced her to the Church’s social teaching and to his own vision for “a new society within the shell of the old.”

On May 1, 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression, Maurin and Day launched the Catholic Worker newspaper. Within only a few years, the paper’s circulation soared and dozens of Catholic Worker houses sprang up across the country. The movement’s members embraced a simple lifestyle (“voluntary poverty”) and cared for poor and homeless people.

The Catholic Worker was also shaped by Day’s unwavering commitment to pacifism. She wrote scathingly about the devastation wrought by atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and protested against nuclear weapons. She joined in nonviolent actions with the civil rights movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, and the United Farm Workers. All the while, over the following decades, she wrote, traveled, gave talks, and encouraged people to practice the works of mercy.

Servant of God Thea Bowman (1937 – 1990)

Thea Bowman was a woman whose life blended faith, education, cultural awareness, forgiveness and a joyful commitment to justice. The granddaughter of a slave, she was born Bertha Elizabeth Bowman in 1937 in Canton, Mississippi. There she learned much of her African-American culture from the family and community around her, including history, stories, songs, prayers, customs and traditions. At the same time, she witnessed the realities of the poor, oppressed, blatant racism, segregation, and the struggle for civil rights in her community.

Thea was raised as a Protestant until at age nine, inspired by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (FSPA), she asked her parents if she could become a Catholic. She joined the sisters in La Crosse, Wisconsin at the age of 15, becoming the first African-American to join the FSPS community. During the transformative 60s, many in the United States were in search of racial equality and justice for all, and Thea experienced a personal, spiritual, and cultural awakening. She rediscovered the African-American heritage and spirituality she had learned in her youth, while simultaneously calling the Catholic Church her “home,” and “family of families.” She became a noted, evangelizer, teacher, writer, and singer sharing the joy of the Gospel and her rich cultural heritage throughout the nation. Eventually Thea became a founding faculty member of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University in New Orleans, promoting racial equality and consistently calling the Church to greater inclusivity. Sadly, in 1984, Thea was diagnosed with breast cancer. With the support of her community she remained undeterred by her illness, physical deterioration, and pain, choosing to face her circumstances with bravery, faith, and purpose.

“… live until I die …”

In 1989, she addressed the U.S. Bishops at their annual meeting. From her wheelchair, dressed in African clothing and bald from chemotherapy treatments, Thea had a “heart to heart” with her “brothers.” With clarity and conviction, she spoke extemporaneously about fully including the African-American community in the Catholic Church in areas of spirituality, education and Church leadership. Her joy, enthusiasm and raw authenticity moved the bishops to tears as she encouraged all to lock arms and sing with her, “We Shall Overcome.”

Gifted with a beautiful singing voice, Thea inspired millions through the gift of Black sacred song, delivered in an unforgettable mezzo-soprano. She recorded the spirituals that had meant so much to her and which were a vital part of her ministry in the studios of the Daughters of St Paul in 1988 while suffering from cancer, just two years before her death.

Final Word

Venerable Cornelia Connelly was a soul sister to these 5 women. Born in Philadelphia in 1809 she was a contemporary of Mary, Henriette and Julia. As wife and mother, she lived in Mississippi and Louisiana — home states of Thea and Henriette. Converting to Catholicism in New Orleans in 1835, maybe Cornelia and Henriette passed each other in St. Louis Cathedral now and then. Though she founded the SHCJ in England, Cornelia dreamt of sending sisters to America, a dream realized in 1862 at the outbreak of the Civil War; the sisters arrived just months after the Emancipation Proclamation freed Julia from slavery. Had Cornelia had a chance to meet Dorothy, they might have talked about their daughters, Tamar and Addy, and asked each other many questions about outreach to poor people, whether in NYC or London. Amazing women of God, all!