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SUMMARY:Vigils Reading - St Katherine Drexel
DESCRIPTION:ST KATHERINE DREXEL \nAn excerpt from “All Saints” by Robert Ellsberg \n◊◊◊ \nKatherine Drexel came from one of the wealthiest families in America. \nHer father was an extremely successful banker\, a Catholic of Austrian descent. \nKatherine did not know her mother\, who died five weeks after her birth. But a \nyear later her father was remarried to another eminent Catholic\, Emma \nBouvier\, who exerted a strong influence on Katherine and her two sisters. When \nFrances Drexel died he established a trust for his three daughters of \n$14\,000\,000. Inspired by their Catholic faith\, they all three regarded this \nfortune as an opportunity to glorify God through the service of others. \nThis was the great era of Catholic immigration\, as American cities \nstretched to accommodate new arrivals from Europe. The Church responded \nwith an extraordinary system of schools\, hospitals\, orphanages\, and other \ncharitable institutions\, proving to the world that Catholics knew how to “look \nafter their own.” There were certainly plenty of claims on the generosity of a \nyoung Catholic heiress. But Katherine Drexel’s concern extended to those \noutside the church\, indeed to those all but excluded from American society – \nnamely\, Indians and blacks. She began by endowing scores of schools on Indian \nreservations across the country. In 1878 during a private audience with Pope \nLeo XIII she begged the pope to send priests to serve the Indians. He responded\, \n“Why not become a missionary yourself?” \nAt this point Katherine realized that it was not enough to share her \nwealth. God was calling her to give everything. Consequently she embarked on a \nlong search to find a religious order corresponding to her own sense of mission. \nBut when none could be found\, she received the support of her bishop to \nestablish her own religious congregation. In 1891 she was professed as the first \nmember of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. \nWithin the year ten other women had joined her order. \nThough Katherine embraced a vow of personal poverty\, she continued to \nadminister the income from her trust – an enormous sum of $400\,000 a year. \nShe might have spent the money to endow the establishment of her own \ncongregation\, but she insisted that her own Sisters rely on alms… In the 1920’s \nshe contributed toward the founding of Xavier University in New Orleans\, the \nfirst Catholic college established for blacks. All told she was personally \nresponsible for establishing 145 Catholic missions and 12 schools for Indians\, \nand 50 schools for black students. \nMother Drexel died on March 3\, 1955\, at the age of ninety-six\, her life \nhaving spanned the era of slavery and the Indian wars to the dawn of the \nmodern civil rights movement. It was a period in which blacks and Indians\, the \ncommunities to which Mother Drexel devoted her life\, were far from the \nconsciousness of most American Catholics. Her charitable works did little \ndirectly to challenge the structures of racism and discrimination. But in the era \nof rigidly enforced racial segregation her work had a profound “witness value.”
URL:https://laycisterciansofgethsemani.org/event/vigils-reading-st-katherine-drexel/
CATEGORIES:Vigils Readings
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