Mother Emma Lewis

Looking back into the history and growth of the Catholic Church at the southern Jersey shore, one would be hard-pressed to find a more beloved and remembered individual than “Mother” Emma Lewis, founder of Atlantic City’s Saint Monica Church community and trailblazer to the Black Catholic Community of South Jersey.

Born in Ohio to Baptist parents in 1869, Lewis moved east to Pittsburgh with her daughter after a difficult marriage and enrolled her child in a school founded by Saint Katharine Drexel, a wealthy Philadelphia woman who became a nun and devoted her life to working among Native Americans and African-Americans.    Read more…