Sister Magdala Marie Gilbert

91, director, Mother Mary Lange Guild

Mother Mary Lange, the nun who established the first Catholic school for African American girls in America and the first successful religious order for Black Catholic sisters in the world, died 140 years ago this year, but to Sister Magdala Marie Gilbert, she could not be more of a living force.

Gilbert, 91, joined Lange’s order, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, 73 years ago and has upheld its vows of poverty and charity ever since. She has worked as a teacher, librarian and director of religious education. But her main occupation today is promoting the cause of sainthood for Lange, the Cuba-born sister who moved to the slave state of Maryland in 1813 and turned her religious faith into revolutionary doings.

Gilbert has been director of the Mother Mary Lange Guild, an organization based at the order’s Catonsville mother house, for 13 years, and it has gone national and international under her leadership.

Now with 17 board members and chapters across the country, the Guild has developed a network of donors and supporters in places as far afield as Poland, Uganda, India and Brazil.

Gilbert can be seen each day making her way to her office above the campus gym, where she knocks out as many as 40 letters — then sometimes has energy left over to add to her extensive writings.

She has published seven small volumes of poetry and two essay collections, much of it about Lange, a woman she says never let the world’s evils “keep her from doing what she had to do.”

“She went about her tasks trusting that God would help her do anything, and God did,” she says, suggesting that today’s activists for social justice might follow her example.

Gilbert might need to do the same for her cause. Canonization is a long and complex process, and Lange has only passed through the first stage, attaining the status of Servant of God.

Vatican officials would have to accept evidence of at least two miracles at some point before Lange could qualify for sainthood, and that could take years.

Gilbert is no more worried about it than Lange would have been.

“To be in the circumstances she was, living in a slave state, to create St. Frances Academy and the first order of Black women, that’s a miracle in itself,” she says. “To me, she’s a saint already. But that’s all in God’s hands.”

— Jonathan M. Pitts