St. Benedict the Moor Mission

Why Go

A Church That Was Never Meant to Be a Side Note

Come here for Mass on Sunday morning. That is the first and best reason, and everything else on this page depends on it. St. Benedict the Moor is a mission of the Cathedral Parish, not a preserved building, and the congregation that gathers here is the continuation of the one gathered in 1889.

Then pray before the relics. In August 2024 Bishop Erik Pohlmeier installed a first-class relic of Carlo Acutis, canonized the following year, alongside a relic of the church's own patron, Saint Benedict the Moor, with statues of both. It is worth sitting with the pairing. Benedict the Moor was the son of enslaved Africans in Sicily, a lay brother who could not read, whom his community elected superior anyway. Carlo Acutis was an Italian teenager with a laptop who died of leukemia at fifteen. Neither was important by the world's reckoning. Both are now given to a congregation that spent most of its history being told it was not important either.

The Sisters Who Were Arrested on Easter Sunday

The Sisters of St. Joseph came to St. Augustine from France in 1866 to teach children freed from slavery, and their work in Lincolnville long outlasted the generation that began it. The neighboring school, first called St. Cecilia's and later renamed for Saint Benedict the Moor, was rebuilt with a gift of seven thousand five hundred dollars from Mother Katharine Drexel, who is now canonized. Year after year it taught ninety to a hundred and ten children in grades one through eight, most of them not Catholic, until Florida schools were integrated in 1968.

In 1913 Florida passed House Bill 415, which forbade white teachers to teach Black students. On Easter Sunday of 1916 three Sisters of St. Joseph were arrested under it. They were acquitted, on the ground that the law did not reach private schools. The point of remembering this is not to make the sisters into heroes of a cause. It is that the sacraments and the alphabet were both understood, by them and by the families who sent their children, as things owed to these children in justice.

Keep the buildings distinct, because they are distinct. The mission church is the red brick building with the stepped bell gable, the rose window, and the round-arched stained glass down the nave. The school stood on the adjoining property and is a separate structure in poor condition; the rectory is a third building again. Guides and photographs frequently blur the three. The church is the one that is open, cared for, and still used for Mass.