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Vigils Reading – St Katherine Drexel
March 3
ST KATHERINE DREXEL
An excerpt from “All Saints” by Robert Ellsberg
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Katherine Drexel came from one of the wealthiest families in America.
Her father was an extremely successful banker, a Catholic of Austrian descent.
Katherine did not know her mother, who died five weeks after her birth. But a
year later her father was remarried to another eminent Catholic, Emma
Bouvier, who exerted a strong influence on Katherine and her two sisters. When
Frances Drexel died he established a trust for his three daughters of
$14,000,000. Inspired by their Catholic faith, they all three regarded this
fortune as an opportunity to glorify God through the service of others.
This was the great era of Catholic immigration, as American cities
stretched to accommodate new arrivals from Europe. The Church responded
with an extraordinary system of schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other
charitable institutions, proving to the world that Catholics knew how to “look
after their own.” There were certainly plenty of claims on the generosity of a
young Catholic heiress. But Katherine Drexel’s concern extended to those
outside the church, indeed to those all but excluded from American society –
namely, Indians and blacks. She began by endowing scores of schools on Indian
reservations across the country. In 1878 during a private audience with Pope
Leo XIII she begged the pope to send priests to serve the Indians. He responded,
“Why not become a missionary yourself?”
At this point Katherine realized that it was not enough to share her
wealth. God was calling her to give everything. Consequently she embarked on a
long search to find a religious order corresponding to her own sense of mission.
But when none could be found, she received the support of her bishop to
establish her own religious congregation. In 1891 she was professed as the first
member of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People.
Within the year ten other women had joined her order.
Though Katherine embraced a vow of personal poverty, she continued to
administer the income from her trust – an enormous sum of $400,000 a year.
She might have spent the money to endow the establishment of her own
congregation, but she insisted that her own Sisters rely on alms… In the 1920’s
she contributed toward the founding of Xavier University in New Orleans, the
first Catholic college established for blacks. All told she was personally
responsible for establishing 145 Catholic missions and 12 schools for Indians,
and 50 schools for black students.
Mother Drexel died on March 3, 1955, at the age of ninety-six, her life
having spanned the era of slavery and the Indian wars to the dawn of the
modern civil rights movement. It was a period in which blacks and Indians, the
communities to which Mother Drexel devoted her life, were far from the
consciousness of most American Catholics. Her charitable works did little
directly to challenge the structures of racism and discrimination. But in the era
of rigidly enforced racial segregation her work had a profound “witness value.”