\u00a0Julia Greeley, Denver\u2019s Angel of Charity, was born into slavery, near Hannibal, Missouri, sometime between 1833 and 1848. While she was still a young child, a cruel slave master, in the course of beating her mother, caught Julia\u2019s right eye with his whip and destroyed it.<\/p>\n
Freed by Missouri\u2019s Emancipation Act in 1865, Julia subsequently earned her keep by serving white families in Missouri, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico\u2014mostly in the Denver area.<\/p>\n
Whatever she did not need for herself, Julia spent assisting poor families in her neighborhood. When her own resources were inadequate, she begged for food, fuel and clothing. One writer later called her a \u201cone-person St. Vincent de Paul Society.\u201d To avoid embarrassing the people she helped, Julia did most of her charitable work under cover of night through dark alleys.<\/p>\n
Julia entered the Catholic Church at Sacred Heart Parish in Denver in 1880, and was an outstanding supporter of all that the parish had to offer. The Jesuits who ran the parish considered her the most enthusiastic promoter of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus they had ever seen. Every month she visited on foot every fire station in Denver and delivered literature of the Sacred Heart League to the firemen, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.<\/p>\n
A daily communicant, Julia had a rich devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin and continued her prayers while working and moving about. She joined the Secular Franciscan Order in 1901 and was active in it till her death in 1918.<\/p>\n
As she lived in a boarding house, Julia\u2019s body was laid out in church, and immediately many hundreds of people began filing past her coffin to pay their grateful respect. She was buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery (sect. 8, Block 7), and for nearly a century many people asked that her cause for canonization<\/a> be considered, a request which was finally granted in the Fall of 2016.<\/p>\n