Posted on 03/03/2003 8:25:01 PM PST by Lady In Blue
Francis Anthony and Hannah Langstroth Drexel gave birth to their second daughter Katharine, on November 26, 1858. One month after Katharine's birth, Hannah passed away. For two years, Katharine and her older sister Elizabeth were cared for by their aunt and uncle, Mr. & Mrs. Anthony J. Drexel. In 1860, Katharine's father, a well known banker and philanthropist, married Emma Bouvier and in 1863 a daughter, Louise was born. The three children were raised in a home of deep faith and tender love.
In 1870, Mr. Drexel purchased a summer home, Saint Michel. in Torresdale, Pennsylvania. Elizabeth and Katharine taught at the Sunday School that Emma Drexel began for the children of employees and neighbors. They spent two afternoons a week helping their mother to service the poor. Their pastor was Reverend James O'Connor, formerly the rector of St. Charles Seminary, and later the bishop of Omaha, Nebraska. He became a cherished family friend, and Katharine's spiritual director. The girls were educated by tutors, and their parents took them on tours of the United States and Europe.
When Katharine was twenty-one, her mother developed cancer, and Katharine nursed her through three years of intense suffering. During this time, the thought of religious life came to her constantly and forcibly. After her mother's death, she wrote for counsel to Bishop O'Connor. As to her call to the religious life itself, he advised her to "Think, pray, and wait."
Mr. Drexel died in 1885. By the terms of his will Katharine and her sisters were, during their lifetime, beneficiaries of the income from his estate. Through the great Indian missionary, Monsignor Joseph Stephan and Katharine became acquainted with the sufferings of the American Indians. With her two sisters, she visited the reservations to see conditions and needs. She began to build schools on the reservations, supplying food, clothing, furnishings, and salaries for teachers. She also found priests to serve the spiritual needs of the people. As she became aware of the suffering of the Black people of the South and East, she extended her charity to them. Throughout her lifetime, through the Bureau of Colored and Indian Missions, she encouraged and financially supported missions throughout this country and abroad.
In 1889 Katharine obtained Bishop O'Connor's consent to become a religious. Her preference was for a cloistered life, but he encouraged her to found an institute to work for the Indians and Colored People. She hesitated at the idea of founding a religious institute but came to accept this as her vocation. On November 7, 1889, she received the religious habit and the name of Sister Mary Katharine. At Bishop O'Connor's death, Archbishop Patrick J. Ryan of Philadelphia became her spiritual guide.
On February 12, 1891, Katharine Drexel pronounced her vows as the first Sister of the Blessed Sacrament. With thirteen companions, she returned to St. Michel.
In 1892 they moved to St. Elizabeth's Convent in Cornwell Heights, now Bensalem, Pennsylvania. The burden of administration and guidance of her congregation in the Eucharistic spirit, the total gift of self, rested on her for forty-four years.
Missionary work began with the opening of a boarding school for Black children, and then one among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. In 1902, St. Michael's School on the Navajo Indian reservation, was opened. As the years passed, boarding and day schools were opened in the East, the Midwest, and in the rural and urban areas of the South and Southwest. In 1917, a school to prepare teachers was established in New Orleans, which received a charter in 1925 as Xavier University of New Orleans.
In 1935, Saint Katharine suffered a severe heart attack, and for the next twenty years lived in prayerful retirement. Her interest and love for the missions deepened, until her death on March 3, 1955. She is interred in the crypt of the Motherhouse Chapel, the Saint Katharine Drexel Shrine.
In the opinion of her contemporaries, she was truly saintly. It was their belief that she was singled out by God's grace. She was a source of inspiration, a model for imitation.
St. Katharine established many ministries from 1891 until her death in 1955. She led a life devoted to uplifting the minds and spirits of Native and African American women, men, and children. Founding and staffing schools for both Native and African Americans throughout the country became a priority for St. Katharine and her congregation. During her lifetime, she opened, staffed, and directly supported nearly sixty schools and missions. St. Katharine also founded Xavier University of Louisiana, the only predominantly Black Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States.
St. Katharine's Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament have joyously and faithfully continued her work for Eucharistic social justice since her death in 1955, despite no longer having her financial resources. St. Katharine's inherited wealth was disbursed according to her father's will to various charities, not including the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament; the congregation was founded after her father's death.
1964 - Introduction of Cause of Canonization The Cause for Canonization was formally opened in 1964 by John Cardinal Krol. Her Cause has advanced as of October 7, 1999. Regarding a healing under investigation, the Medical Board at the Vatican in Rome stated: "There is no natural cause for the cure attributed to St. Katharine Drexel." Katharine Drexel was canonized October 1, 2000.
March 3, 2005
 St. Katharine Drexel
(1858-1955)
If your father is an international banker and you ride in a private railroad car, you are not likely to be drawn into a life of voluntary poverty. But if your mother opens your home to the poor three days each week and your father spends half an hour each evening in prayer, it is not impossible that you will devote your life to the poor and give away millions of dollars. Katharine Drexel did that. She was born in Philadelphia in 1858. She had an excellent education and traveled widely. As a rich girl, she had a grand debut into society. But when she nursed her stepmother through a three-year terminal illness, she saw that all the Drexel money could not buy safety from pain or death, and her life took a profound turn. She had always been interested in the plight of the Indians, having been appalled by reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor. While on a European tour, she met Pope Leo XIII and asked him to send more missionaries to Wyoming for her friend Bishop James O’Connor. The pope replied, “Why don’t you become a missionary?” His answer shocked her into considering new possibilities. Back home, she visited the Dakotas, met the Sioux leader Red Cloud and began her systematic aid to Indian missions. She could easily have married. But after much discussion with Bishop O’Connor, she wrote in 1889, “The feast of St. Joseph brought me the grace to give the remainder of my life to the Indians and the Colored.” Newspaper headlines screamed “Gives Up Seven Million!” After three and a half years of training, she and her first band of nuns (Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored) opened a boarding school in Santa Fe. A string of foundations followed. By 1942 she had a system of black Catholic schools in 13 states, plus 40 mission centers and 23 rural schools. Segregationists harassed her work, even burning a school in Pennsylvania. In all, she established 50 missions for Indians in 16 states. Two saints met when she was advised by Mother Cabrini about the “politics” of getting her Order’s Rule approved in Rome. Her crowning achievement was the founding of Xavier University in New Orleans, the first university in the United States for blacks. At 77, she suffered a heart attack and was forced to retire. Apparently her life was over. But now came almost 20 years of quiet, intense prayer from a small room overlooking the sanctuary. Small notebooks and slips of paper record her various prayers, ceaseless aspirations and meditation. She died at 96 and was canonized in 2000 Quote:
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BTTT on the Optional Memorial of St. Katherine Drexel, March 3, 2006!
BTTT on the Optional Memorial of St. Katherine Drexel, March 3, 2007!
Saint Katharine Drexel, virgin
Optional Memorial
March 3rd
Saint Katharine Drexel
Photographer unknown
Collect:
Ever-loving God, You called Saint Katharine Drexel
to teach the message of the Gospel and to bring the life of the Eucharist
to the African American and Native American peoples.
By her prayers and example, enable us to work for justice among the poor and the oppressed,
and keep us undivided in love in the eucharistic community of Your Church.
Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
(Readings are from the Common of Virgins or of Holy Women.)
On October 1, 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized Katharine Drexel, an American heiress who devoted her life (and her considerable fortune) to establishing missions, schools and homes for black and Indian children in this country. She was beatified November 20, 1988
Katharine was born in Philadelphia November 26, l858, barely three years before the outbreak of the Civil War. So deeply divided was the country over the issue of slavery, with all its heavy moral, ethical, cultural, economic and emotional considerations (not unlike those which attend the abortion issue today), that the young nation was forced to undergo this terrible war to determine whether any nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could "long endure", as President Lincoln so concisely expressed it at Gettysburg.
Katharine Drexel grew to maturity in the shadow of the agony of that great war and its aftermath of bitterness and confusion. Although the war to abolish slavery was won and the union of the States preserved, deep and lasting damage had been done. Not only were many thousands of lives destroyed, not only was a culture virtually demolished, but even those who had been "liberated" -- the emancipated slaves -- were subject to continued humiliation and brutal poverty.
Katharine's wealthy and socially prominent family were deeply religious Catholics who conducted a Sunday school for black children in their home. Her parents' example of devotion to their faith and to the needs of others had an indelible formative effect on Katharine. At the age of thirty-three, she founded a separate order of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament which was entirely devoted to the active care of blacks and Indians. She spent the rest of her long life tirelessly and courageously evangelizing and educating these "poorest of the poor". She died Marcn 3, 1955.
Like Saint Philippine Duchesne, who preceded her in work with the Indians of America (and who was canonized in 1988), and like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Katharine's example shows us that the path to holiness can be found in our willing response to Christ's voice heard in the cries of the most lowly and needy of His people.
Through the strength of their faith and their valiant perseverence in spite of conflict and hardships; through their vigorous and unselfish consecration of all their womanly energies and talents and gifts to serving others; through their whole-hearted obedience to God's will for them, all these women have carried the Light of Christ into the darkest corners of the Earth. They have given strength to the weak with the love and the prayers of their "maternal hearts"; they have sheltered and comforted the forsaken in the warm embrace of their "maternal arms."
Excerpt from Valiant Women, Vigorous Faith, by Helen Hull Hitchcock
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