Sister Julia Greeley

The highest honor that has ever been paid to a Colorado Catholic layman immediately following death has been given within the last week to a negress, Julia Greeley, an aged woman who died in poverty in the Sacred Heart parish, but who is declared by the Jesuit Fathers of that church to have been the most zealous apostle of the Sacred Heart they have ever known.

And she died on the feast of the Sacred Heart. Her end came unexpectedly. But she received the full rites of the Church. The time of her death, considering the work she did in life, makes it look as if the very finger of God was present

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After her conversion, Julia Greeley for a long time attended the old Cathedral on Stout street, and she is remembered by pioneer Catholics as a familiar figure there. But she had been identified with the Sacred Heart parish ever since its establishment in 1879. And no other layman has worked harder from that day to this for the upbuilding of the church.

 

She has been a daily Communicant practically ever since her conversion, said Father [Charles A.] McDonnell, S.J., this week. She was charitable to an astonishing degree and had a devotion to the Sacred Heart, the Blessed Virgin and the Blessed Sacrament that was marvelous. “It was not sentimentality, but real piety,” said the priest.

 

No other Denverite has equaled her record in distributing Sacred Heart League leaflets. Denver is a big city and very widespread, but she used to visit every firehouse and hand out leaflets to the Catholic firemen. There was not a fireman, Catholic or non-Catholic, in Denver who did not know old Julia, for she never missed a month going the rounds with the leaflets. She took copies of the Messenger of the Sacred Heart to every firehouse monthly, and often gave the boys there other Catholic literature. As regular as clockwork every year, she got fifty subscriptions to The Messenger of the Sacred Heart and sold something like 200 Catholic almanacs. And she could neither read, write nor count!

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​Her charity was so great that only God knows its extent. She was constantly visiting the poor and giving them assistance from her own slender means. When she found their needs so great that she could not help them with her own goods, she begged for them. Her charity was as delicate as it was great. She realized that white people, no matter how poor, might feel a little sensitive in receiving assistance from an old colored woman, so she went at night to their homes to deliver the goods she had begged, in order to keep the neighbors from seeing her. She had even been seen going thru the streets at night with a mattress on her back. Many and many a times she was seen carrying coal and groceries. Yet she was so poor herself that the city charity department had been furnishing her with fuel and groceries.