The Courage to Love is a movie about awesome nuns! Don’t the let the initial narration glorifying the exploitation of the mulatto community turn you off the movie. It is a tv movie so there is an unnecessary love story (cue my irrational hatred of all things Gil Bellows, i.e. Billy from Ally McBeal) & an incredible demand by the casting director that the audience believe that Vanessa Williams is a teenager (she is gorgeous, but a teenager, no. When you’re one of the main producers, I guess that you can be whatever you want to be) & Stacy Keach is European. What is awesome about the movie is how it sneaks in reality: slavery was awful! Children got raped & their fathers couldn’t defend them without being beaten. The slave owners didn’t look at their children born from rape as children, but as wealth & other. The free women of the mulatto community only have a moderately better life–they are given the illusion of respect, but are really exploited, expected to survive as mistresses to white men with no legal protection or rights normally given to wives or children of a marriage–placage was an extralegal system. The story focuses on Henriette DeLille, who decides that she wants no part of it, embraced her Christian faith & founded the Catholic order of free women of color that helped the sick & poor, which of course included slaves. She was very outspoken in her support of legal marriage & denounced the placage system for what it was–sexual exploitation of women because of their race. Just because slave owners go to church doesn’t mean they see the light. Instead cue usual hypocrisy & obligatory persecution because of race & the community outraged that the church would help the sick, poor & black. Fortunately the Catholic Church didn’t give in to community pressure & the order still exists today.