Dressing the Altars: Black Catholic Holy Work and Belief in Santo Domingo, 1789–1881

Recent scholarship on Black confraternities has examined how these lay Catholic institutions preserved and transmitted African languages and traditions, shaped public city life, promoted kinship formation among enslaved and free people, moderated the ravages of slavery and of racial hierarchies, and facilitated the accumulation of capital and prestige for African-descent confraternity members. The next step is to understand what confraternity members believed.

In 1872, the members of the confraternity of Nuestra Señora del Carmen in the city of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) wrote an exposition of their holy work and sent it to the resident apostolic vicar. The confraternity of Nuestra Señora del Carmen was a Black brotherhood; it had been dedicated to the city’s Black population at its founding in the late sixteenth century and clearly claimed that character through at least the mid- nineteenth century. The members presented their confraternity as the caretaker of a fragile and besieged physical church and as the custodian of the sacred cult to the Virgin. Even when the confraternity had been forced to close in the past, their faithful leaders (“fervorosos”) had cared for the church. This was their theology: the exercise of Holy Religion needed a sacred temple, and the physical temple needed them.

This exposition and other records left by this confraternity preserve evidence of both the practice and understanding of Catholicism by African-descent Catholics in the Dominican Republic. I extract a theology—what Afro-Catholics believed about the holy and God—from the confraternity’s records from the end of the eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. I consider how this confraternity’s work and beliefs survived and changed under war and violence, regime change and nation-building, and a circulating global devotional culture.