Single pregnant women and abused women found protection and healing at the Lower 9th Ward’s Temple of the Innocent Blood in the 1920s. 

Some called it a church, others called it a cult. Mother Catherine Seals called it the Manger. 

“While Mother Catherine practiced spiritual healing,” states a 2020 Spiritual Path Church article, “her other mission was to take care of women so that they could keep their children.” 

Located at 2420 Charbonnet St., the temple had 10,000 followers. 

According to a 2011 New Orleans Magazine article, Seals entered the temple from a hole in the roof wearing white robes. “Dogs, goats, chickens and a sheep roamed and parrots squawked freely within the church compound,” the article states. “Discarded crutches, belonging to both Black and white followers…lined the walls of the building as testimony to her power.”

A Kentucky native, Seals was born in 1887 as Nanny Cowans. She moved to New Orleans as a teenager. By the time Cowans’ predecessor, Mother Leafy Anderson, had founded the Spiritual Church movement in 1920, Cowans had been married three times and had two children. Her third husband was abusive. She changed her name and founded the temple in 1922 after a white healer turned her away because she was Black. 

According to a Historic New Orleans Collection article by Jason Berry, Seals played trombone and filled the temple with musical instruments. Jazzmen also played at religious services. After her Aug. 12, 1930 death, thousands of people followed the brass band funeral procession during a thunderstorm. One of Seals’ followers, Berry wrote, recalled her saying the sun would shine in the rain. “When the funeral reached the Industrial Canal bridge,” he said, “the sun broke through and people started fallin’ out on the bridge. People had babies in their arms, and they knew it was prophecy.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...