Sister Patricia Ralph has seen a lot in her decades as a Sister of St. Joseph teaching and leading Catholic schools in Washington, D.C.

On July 22, in the middle of a summer when most teachers try to get their minds off the classroom, she took her assignment as a teacher at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Academy, where she has worked since 1997, to a new level. That Saturday morning, a rented white Hummer pulled up to the Southeast Washington school to take six students and recent graduates to National Harbor, Maryland. There, a crowd of thousands awaited at the National Black Catholic Congress XIII.

A group of students who recently graduated from the eighth grade there joined some current middle schoolers in portraying six Black American Catholics whose causes for canonization in the Catholic Church are active, in addition to Daniel Rudd, the devout Catholic and Black journalist who helped launch the National Black Catholic Congress in 1889.

“I got you,” Amari Taylor, a 2023 graduate of St. Francis Xavier, who answered Sister Patricia when she asked him to portray Daniel Rudd, who had the most speaking lines in the presentation. 

Andre Williams, also a member of the school’s class of 2023, portrayed Venerable Father Augustus Tolton from Chicago, the first Catholic priest in the United States known to be Black, while classmate Tai’Lynn Quigley of the class of 2023 acted as Mother Mary Lange, who founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first Catholic order of African American women religious, in Baltimore in 1829 and was declared venerable by Pope Francis in June.

“They came back to help a sister out,” Sister Patricia said, to a laugh, when mentioning the three recent graduates helping with the presentation. She grew up in a family of eight children in Jersey City, New Jersey, and her twin sister, Blessed Sacrament Sister Lynn Marie Ralph, collaborated with her on the presentation, writing the brief biographical scripts for the St. Francis Xavier students, who memorized them at her insistence. Sister Lynn Marie serves as a pastoral care associate for Redeemer Health in Philadelphia.  

Rising seventh grade twins Omon Davis and Odion Davis portrayed two additional sainthood candidates, Servant of God Julie Greeley from Denver and Venerable Pierre Toussaint from New York City, who were known for their works of charity. 

Rising sixth grader Penelope Hawkins portrayed Venerable Henriette Delille, foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans. 

Sister Patricia’s cousin, Valerie Lewis-Mosley, stood in for a student unable to attend the Saturday event and portrayed Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, a dynamic Catholic evangelist and educator from Mississippi who died in 1990. 

During a six-week period before the National Black Catholic Congress, Sister Patricia and Sister Lynn Marie met over Zoom twice with her students, following an initial meeting with Dr. Valerie Washington, executive director of the NBCC; Dr. Camille Brown Privette, the president of the Consortium of Catholic Academies of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington; and Harold Thomas Jr., the longtime principal of St. Francis Xavier Catholic Academy. Sister Patricia, a middle school English Language Arts teacher at St. Francis Xavier, is a member of the NBCC board. 

Sister Patricia and Sister Lynn Marie followed up the two Zoom meetings with a dress rehearsal at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center, where this year’s National Black Catholic Congress took place. Sister Patricia and Sister Lynn Marie studied the clothing that Daniel Rudd and the six sainthood candidates wore during their lifetimes and ordered clothing through Amazon as a part of the preparation.

Sister Patricia admitted to feeling nervous about the presentation, and she stayed in the green room of the gathering hall, watching the presentations over the TV monitor. She knew her student had connected very well with the audience when dozens of audience members rushed forward near the stage at the end to take the students’ photos. 

Paula Gwynn Grant, secretary of communications for the Archdiocese of Washington, served as the master of ceremonies at the event. As the students stood onstage after their presentation, uncertain of next steps, she instructed them to stay there for a few minutes while those gathered took photos.

“We didn’t rehearse that,” Andre Williams later told Sister Patricia. 

Sister Lynn Marie witnessed one non-Catholic St. Francis Xavier student saying the Our Father and Hail Mary as he prayed before performing that day. “Keep your eye on that one,” she told Sister Patricia, who noted the excitement at the school when Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory visited St. Francis Xavier Catholic Academy during the 2021-2022 school year, and recalled that the prelate had become a Catholic while attending sixth grade in a Catholic school in Chicago.