e and progress of the race, religious
orders and missionary associations took up the work for the Negro. The
first of these was the Fathers of the Society of St. Joseph, founded
by Cardinal Vaughan, of England. They are known as the Josephites and
now have priests and missionaries in nearly all Southern States and
dioceses. There are also laboring in this field Fathers of the Holy
Ghost, as also members of the Society of the African Missions, and the
Society of the Divine Word. Furthermore, there are a number of colored
and white Sisterhoods conducting orphanages, academies and Christian
Schools for colored children.

In the Second and Third Plenary Councils, the Bishops of the Catholic
Church in the United States as a body took up the cause of the Negro
race. The Bishops have when occasion offered, by word and deed, shown
their friendship and zeal in behalf of the Negro. They have
individually raised their voices for humanity and the black man.
Cardinal Gibbons, who has long been the leading prelate among the
American Bishops, has not only often spoken a good word for the Negro,
when the occasion called for it, but has proved by actions his
Christian spirit and heroic charity. Among the many instances of his
zeal and self-sacrifice, it is related that when he was a young priest
in charge of the parish of Elk Ridge, near Baltimore, smallpox broke
out in the village, and a general exodus at once followed. One old
Negro man, lying at the point of death, had been abandoned by his
family and was left alone in his cabin, without food or medicine.
Father Gibbons, hearing of the case, hastened to the old man's relief;
he procured everything necessary for him, and stood by and tended him
until he died. He then procured a coffin and having placed the corpse
in it, carried it to the graveyard and buried it with his own
hands.[506] A similar incident is told of Rev. J. A. Cunnane, of Upper
Marlboro, Maryland, now a pastor in Baltimore. When stationed in
Charles County he attended an old colored man during an epidemic of
smallpox, "took the body to the grave on a wheelbarrow, and with his
own hands buried it."[507]

Cardinal Gibbons, some years ago, wrote a letter in which occur the
following sentiments:

"What then is the first need of the colored people? A sound
religious education; an education that will bring them to a
practical knowledge of God, that will teach them their origin and
the sublime destiny