Servant of God Julia Greeley

Julia Greeley was born into slavery in Missouri sometime about the 1830s/40s. At age five, her right eye was injured as a man whipped her mother, leaving her permanently disfigured. In 1865, Julia was emancipated. She moved to St. Louis and became a cook and nanny. When the family she worked for moved to Colorado, she went with them. She later went to work in Wyoming and New Mexico but continued to return to Denver.  

In 1880, Julia was baptized into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Denver. She had a particular devotion to the Sacred Heart. She attended daily Mass and walked around the city distributing literature from the Sacred Heart League, which published literature on Catholicism and devotion to the Sacred Heart. She was known for visiting every firehouse in Denver once a month to share pamphlets with the firemen.

She also pulled a red wagon through the streets of Denver, dispute her arthritis, delivering food, coal, and clothing to the needy. She’d deliver to white families after dark so they wouldn’t be embarrassed accepting help from a black woman. She even donated her own burial plot to a man who was going to be buried in a pauper’s grave.

In 1901, Julia joined the Secular Franciscans and continued to works of charity. She became known as “Denver’s Angel of Charity.”

She died in 1918 on the Feast of the Sacred Heart. She was the first Catholic layperson to lay in state in a Catholic church in Denver. People streamed in for five hours to pay their respects. She was buried in a Franciscan habit in a plot donated to her.

In her obituary it was said, “Her skin was black, but her heart was whiter than the purest snow. She would as soon have confessed her sins on the street as anywhere else, for she did nothing of which she could be very ashamed. So do you wonder that this old negro woman had the distinction of being called to the other life on the Feast of the Sacred Heart?”

In 2014, the archdiocese began her cause for sainthood.