JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, has falsely accused Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, of stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. What should be our response to such disregard for the truth—and to such an apparent lack of compassion?
Five years ago, Vance became a Roman Catholic, becoming a co-religionist of about one-third of the Haitian population. In an interview with the conservative commentator Rod Dreher shortly after he became Roman Catholic, he said he liked Roman Catholicism because it was “old,” it felt “true,” and was the religion of an uncle by marriage whom he really cared for. But there is more to the Catholic faith than it being “old.”
Among the church’s premier educational practices is storytelling—using Bible stories and the lives of the saints to teach. And there is a devout and celebrated Roman Catholic whose own story has some similarities with that of Mr. Vance. This man wasn’t a “hillbilly,” but like Mr. Vance, he came from a marginalized population. Also, like Mr. Vance, through hard work, he became wealthy and successful, known to the families of famous politicians, military leaders and college presidents. This man also acknowledged, as has Mr. Vance, that he had a problem with anger. Like Mr. Vance, this man had no relationship with his biological father, and he ultimately chose for himself the last name of someone he admired.
That man was Pierre Toussaint, and the aspects Mr. Vance might want to emulate are sprinkled throughout his life story. He came to America from Haiti, before 1800—an enslaved man of color, brought along when his French owners fled their plantation as the efforts of Toussaint Louverture to free the enslaved gained momentum. In New York, Toussaint’s owners apprenticed him to a hairdresser so the women of the family could be suitably gussied up for their social life, but allowed Toussaint to keep some of his earnings.
Suddenly, Toussaint’s owner lost all his wealth and died, leaving an impoverished widow. Without warning, Toussaint, the only wage owner in the household, became responsible for his own enslaved relatives and his owners’ family, including the widow’s eventual second husband. A man of keen compassion, Toussaint supported them all for several years until the owner’s wife, on her deathbed, freed him. Once free, Toussaint chose his own surname, apparently an homage to the Haitian abolitionist. He then went on to become the hairdresser to wealthy New Yorkers and French expats, leading one historian to call him “The Vidal Sassoon of his day.”
Just as Mr. Vance had mentors, so did Toussaint. Among them were clients who were members of the Hamilton family and the family of Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler. The wife of Columbia University president Nathaniel Fish Moore was a client of Toussaint’s, and Moore, an avid amateur photographer, asked Toussaint to sit for a photograph taken soon before Toussaint’s death in 1853. Through his life, Toussaint helped house the homeless, tended the sick, educated black orphans, and was philanthropically generous.
Oh, and Toussaint and his wife cooked food to feed the hungry.
Luckily one of Hamilton’s descendants, and the heir to Toussaint’s correspondence, started an archive for Toussaint at the New York Public Library. When Toussaint’s lifelong piety and philanthropy made him a possible candidate for sainthood, the Vatican relied almost entirely on the archive, and in 1997, Pope John Paul II placed him on the road to canonization. Toussaint is the only layman and the only man of color to be entombed alongside the nine archbishops in the crypt below the main altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
By his own account, one of the intellectual figures who drew Mr. Vance to Catholicism was René Girard, a Catholic convert and cultural theorist who first developed the mimetic theory that many Catholic intellectuals have embraced. Girard argued that people develop their desires from imitating what others, including saints, have desired, and not from within.
At the time Mr. Vance became a Catholic, he said in an interview that “I hope my faith makes me more compassionate and [able] to identify with people who are struggling.” In that case, he would do well to study the life and deeds of Pierre Toussaint, an exemplar of compassion.
