NEW ORLEANS (RNS) It was a little after 9 a.m. Monday (March 29) when Sister Eva Regina Martin got on the intercom with an urgent announcement for the 30 or so nuns at the Sisters of the Holy Family convent: Please assemble in chapel immediately, she said.

Minutes later, Martin told them the news: the Vatican has moved their founder, Sister Henriette Delille, a step closer to sainthood for her years of work caring for cast-off slaves, impoverished Africans and people of color in antebellum New Orleans.

“There were tears on some faces, yes there were,” Martin said.

The announcement comes five years after the order and other friends of Delille submitted the fruit of 16 years of research: nearly 3,000 pages of historical data the nuns believe make their founder’s case for exceptional holiness.

Technically, Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday issued a decree declaring Delille “venerable,” a status two steps removed from being formally recognized as a saint. It means the Vatican process that examines the historical record is formally convinced that Delille lived a life of “heroic virtue.”

The Vatican endorsement puts Delille one large step closer to sainthood. Two miracles attributed to Delille’s intercession would be required to advance her to canonization, which the New Orleans nuns have sought since 1989.

Martin said advocates for Delille’s cause hope they already have one case that will pass Vatican muster as a potential miracle: the cure in 1998 of a 4-year-old Houston girl suffering from an overwhelming pulmonary infection. It may be many months, or years, before the order knows whether the Vatican concurs.

Born about 1812 as a fourth-generation free woman of color, Delille seemed destined to live as a mistress to a white businessman, bearing him a second family in the social system known as placage. Instead, Delille embarked on a career of sharing the faith, teaching and caring for impoverished blacks and free persons of color.

After she died in 1862, the community of like-minded women she formed was eventually constituted as the Sisters of the Holy Family, with 111 members in nursing, education and social work, Martin said.

The sisters began campaigning for her sainthood in the late 1980s. The church’s legacy of segregation, its marginalization of black Catholics and the lack of a strong written record of Delille’s work had contributed to a kind of institutional amnesia.

Since then, Delille’s legacy has gained traction. Delille’s friends and heirs now maintain a mailing list of 10,000 names. Advocates encourage people to ask for Delille’s favor in prayers, the better to produce the two miracles needed for canonization.