On June 9, 1918, in a Denver chapel, thousands of people filed silently past the body of the first American Catholic laywoman ever granted the privilege of lying in state. This extraordinary woman was not a member of the city’s ruling class. She was a domestic worker, formerly enslaved, with only one good eye, who wore the same clothes every day. Her name was Julia Greeley, and she spent herself ministering to Denver’s poor.
Ms. Greeley, one of the “Saintly Six” African Americans being considered for canonization, has been on my mind since Vice President JD Vance—who, like Ms. Greeley (and me), is a convert to Catholicism—started using his office to inveigh against Catholic bishops. On Mr. Vance’s telling, the bishops’ concern for immigrants veils concern for their own “bottom line,” whereas America First embodies a “very Christian concept” that prioritizes love of family over love of neighbor.
Since Mr. Vance calls himself a “devout Catholic,” Pope Francis’s recent letter to the US bishops should give him pause, for the pope refutes Mr. Vance’s restrictive understanding of “ordered love.” But if the Vice President, and others among the estimated 54 percent of U.S. Catholics who voted for Mr. Trump, requires a practical example of what Francis means by “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” he should learn about Julia Greeley. She offers a distinctly American model of how a devout Catholic puts faith into action.
Julia Greeley was born into slavery in Hannibal, Missouri, in the 1830s or 1840s; she could not recall the year. When she was three, a slavemaster’s whip destroyed her vision in her right eye. For the rest of her life, tear fluid would flow continually from the area of her damaged eye. Those who knew her when she was an adult recalled that she had to constantly wipe her eye with a handkerchief.
Ms. Greeley was middle-aged and, since being freed under the Emancipation Proclamation, had been working as a domestic servant when, in the late 1870s, she moved from Missouri to Denver to work for a married couple there, William and Julia Gilpin. Through the influence of Mrs. Gilpin, a prayerful Catholic, she was moved to enter the Catholic Church on June 26, 1880, at Denver’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church. From then on, she harbored an intense devotion to the church’s namesake, modeling her own heart upon the heart of Jesus.
In time, Mr. Gilpin, who was not Catholic, developed an irrational hostility toward Ms. Greeley, resenting the warm affection that his wife and children had for her. By the spring of 1883, he had not only fired her but also had begun a rumor campaign accusing her of immorality, intending to prevent her from finding employment elsewhere.
As Ms. Greeley struggled to find steady work, the Gilpins’ marriage deteriorated. In 1887, Mr. Gilpin sued for divorce, packing his brief with dozens of accusations against his wife, including the claim that she had brought “a lewd and unprincipled woman” into the home—meaning Ms. Greeley.
Many people testified at the divorce trial on Ms. Greeley’s behalf, calling her a good servant of high character, modesty, and virtue. But the case, which dragged on for years, was still a nightmarish experience for her, as both her own reputation and that of Mrs. Gilpin, whom she loved dearly, were attacked.
Through the trial, Ms. Greeley, already no stranger to suffering, came to deepen her self-identification with Jesus, who likewise had to endure unjust accusations and mockery. Yet she is not being considered for sainthood for her suffering, but rather for how she responded to it—extending her empathy to other poverty-stricken people.
Who were Ms. Greeley’s neighbors? At that time, about 98 percent of Denver’s population was White, including the overwhelming majority of its poor. Black people were excluded from most of Denver’s restaurants, hotels, and theaters. Racism so reigned among White Denverites that, by the mid-1920s, the reformed Ku Klux Klan controlled the mayor’s office and police department as well as the state legislature and governorship.
It is clear, then, that, as a Black woman who was old, half-blind, and crippled by arthritis, Ms. Greeley was an outsider in her own city. If she were following JD Vance’s purportedly Christian concept of centering her charity upon her “community,” she would have limited it to the small corner of northeast Denver that constituted its Black neighborhood.
Ms. Greeley’s understanding of charity, however, was considerably more expansive. When not mopping the floors of Sacred Heart Church to pay the rent on her boarding-house room, she could be seen pulling a little red wagon through Denver’s streets, collecting and distributing clothes for the poor.
Newspaper reports at the time of her death noted the care Ms. Greeley took to protect the pride of the poor White families she helped, who could lose what little social status they had if they were seen receiving assistance from a Black woman. She would wait until dark to venture out hauling a basket of food or even carrying a mattress on her back to a needy home. Once she woke her pastor up at midnight to enlist his help taking food and coal to a desperate family.
Another object of Ms. Greeley’s charity was Sacred Heart Church itself. Although it had many wealthy parishioners, she was its most dedicated fundraiser.
Once, Sacred Heart’s Young Ladies Sodality held a benefit in the form of a popularity/beauty contest, charging ten cents per vote. While the young women solicited votes from families and friends, Ms. Greeley approached the one group that was certain to back her: firefighters.
All Denver’s firefighters knew Ms. Greeley. Every month, in advance of the first Friday (when Catholics celebrate the First Friday devotion to the Sacred Heart), she would walk to each of the city’s firehouses—a twenty-two-mile journey—to bring them Catholic literature and little badges of the Sacred Heart.
So Ms. Greeley took the risk of being teased by approaching the firefighters to ask them to vote for her in the contest. She raised about $350—and won.
What would JD Vance make of Julia Greeley’s Catholic witness? I imagine he would applaud her efforts to spread devotion to the Sacred Heart. Having grown up in a home where, as he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, “poverty [was] the family tradition,” he would also likely be touched by her efforts to help poor White families.
But I fear Mr. Vance would fail to grasp that, to Ms. Greeley, loving the Sacred Heart and loving the needy members of a community that excluded her were not separate things. She did not see being a “devout Catholic” in opposition to having a heart that bled for suffering people both near and far.
Only in death did Ms. Greeley’s often-hidden charity become visible to all. When her body was laid out for viewing at Sacred Heart Parish’s Loyola Chapel, so many people swarmed the small building that the pastor extended the wake for five hours. The masses could see what Mr. Vance cannot: true faith honors the human dignity of neighbor and stranger alike.
Julia Greeley image: Public domain. JD Vance image: “J. D. Vance” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gage Skidmore.
Dawn Eden Goldstein is a theologian and canon lawyer. She researched the life of Julia Greeley for her upcoming book The Sacred Heart: A Love for All Times. Follow her on BlueSky @dawnofmercy.
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