Pierre Toussaint - Legacy

Legacy

• 1854, a biography, Memoir of Pierre Toussaint, Born a Slave in St. Domingo, was written by Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee and published in Boston, one of the genre known as slave narratives.
• In the 1950s, John Boyle O'Reilly Committee for Interracial Justice, an Irish-American group devoted to social justice for blacks, began researching and promoting Toussaint's life story.
• Because of Toussaint's reputation of great charity and piety, Cardinal Terence Cooke, then Archbishop of New York, authorized the formation of a committee to study the possibility of a formal cause for seeking his canonization. In 1991 his successor, Cardinal John O'Connor, strongly supported Toussaint for sainthood and began the official process, thereby according him the title of Servant of God, and sent the needed documentation to the Vatican for this process. As part of the process, the cardinal had Toussaint's body exhumed and examined. He was reinterred in the main cathedral.
• Toussaint was the first layman to be honored by burial in the crypt below the main altar of St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The crypt is normally reserved for bishops of the Archdiocese of New York.
• In 1996 Toussaint was declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II, the second step toward sainthood.
• The Pierre Toussaint Haitian-Catholic Center in Miami, Florida is named for him.