Josephite Fathers
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The Josephite Fathers and Brothers or more properly, the Society of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart (abbreviated post-nominally as S.S.J.) is an American Society of Catholic priests and brothers, founded in 1892, when priests who had been members of the English Foreign Mission Society of Saint Joseph (also known as the Mill Hill Fathers, and abbreviated post-nominally as C.J.) decided to work permanently in the United States as an apostolate dedicated to newly-freed black American slaves after the Civil War.
[edit] Early beginnings
The end of the American Civil War in 1865 ushered in the period of Southern Reconstruction during which time, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, outlawing slavery, was passed. Ten former confederate states were divided into five military districts. As a condition of readmission to the Union, the former confederate states were required to accept the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution. It is against this backdrop that the American bishops met for their tenth provincial council in Baltimore in 1869. The fifth decree of this Council exhorted the Council Fathers to provide missions and schools for all black Americans in their dioceses. Subsequently the Council Fathers wrote a letter requesting clergy for that purpose to Father Herbert Vaughan (later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster), superior general of the Saint Joseph Society for Foreign Missions in Mill Hill, London who founded the society in 1866.
