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 Katharine
Marie Drexel
Missionary to the American Indians
By
Anne Adams
Many of the greatest saints in the Roman
Catholic Church came from a poverty that
drew them closer to God and helped influence
them to serve him. Yet it was different in
one case for when Katharine Marie Drexel was
declared a saint at the turn of the 21st
century, childhood poverty was never an
issue. As the daughter of a wealthy
Philadelphia banker, though Katharine left a
life of wealth and privilege to become a
nun, she retained her family’s compassion
and concern for neglected and rejected
persons.
Katharine Marie Drexel was born in November,
1858, into an influential and prosperous
family. Her grandfather started out as a
broker in Kentucky, and then he moved to
Philadelphia and brought his two sons into
the business. Soon the Drexel Company was a
major financial power in the Philadelphia
area.
However, despite their wealth, the Drexel
family was not immune from personal tragedy.
Weakened by the births of Katharine and her
older sister, their mother Hannah died when
Katharine was just a few weeks old. An aunt
cared for them until Mr. Drexel remarried in
1860 to Emma Bouvier, whose family would
later be represented in the White House by
First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. The
second Mrs. Drexel was a devoted and loving
mother to her stepdaughters who responded
with deep affection.
While Emma Drexel arranged for the best
tutors for both girls, she paid particular
attention to their religious education. As a
devout Catholic, Mrs. Drexel instructed the
girls in the tenets of the faith, as well as
the lives of the saints. In addition, Mr.
and Mrs. Drexel felt that with their wealth
came the responsibility to use their money
to benefit others and it was a belief that
the family personally demonstrated. Mrs.
Drexel distributed food, clothing and coal
as well as financial assistance from their
home while Mr. Drexel privately assisted
priests from other countries to settle into
new lives in the U.S. With such an
influence, Katharine matured into an
intelligent and seriously religious young
woman. However, when Emma died from cancer
in 1883 Katharine was devastated and the
loss expressed a prophetic intention. “If
anything happens to Mama,” she told her
sister, “I’m going to enter a convent.
However, that was yet to come.
When Katharine
and her sister Louise accompanied Mr. Drexel
to the West on a business trip they
encountered the people Katherine would
eventually seek to serve. After traveling
first traveled by railroad, and then by
Conestoga wagon Katharine saw first how
American Indians lived.
Francis Drexel
died in 1885, leaving a portion of his
fortune to his favorite Catholic charities
and the rest ($4 million or in $250 million
in modern terms) in trust for his daughters.
The girls naturally attracted not only
potential suitors but also appeals from
various charities and Katharine was
particularly interested in one aid
organization. She began supporting a group
of Catholic missionaries working with native
tribes in the west. Then, according to one
story, when Katharine visited Pope Leo XIII
in Rome seeking missionaries for her
projects, she was surprised when the Pope
suggested she herself become a missionary.
With a new sense of purpose and dedication
to God, she became a Sister of Mercy in May,
1889. Yet she retained her concern and
compassion for others, particularly Indian
and black peoples, two groups that were
often victims of society’s prejudices and
deprivations.
To fully serve Christ as his representative
with these groups in 1891 she established
the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for
Indians and Colored People as it was
officially known. Then three years later she
dispatched sisters to open and operate an
American Indian school in Santa Fe.
Eventually the order established a hundred
similar schools in the west and the south.
However, there were some in these areas who
did not welcome their efforts, particularly
in the south, with the resurgence of “Jim
Crow” segregation. Often during these years
Katharine and her order alone represented
and demonstrated the Church’s concern, and a
major accomplishment of this purpose was the
establishment beginning in 1915 of the
Catholic historically black college that
became Xavier University in New Orleans.
Sometimes the Sisters encountered dangerous
opposition that threatened their lives, such
as in Texas in 1922 when the KKK threatened
the local Catholic school and church. Yet
after a tornado destroyed the Klan
headquarters and two of their members died,
the group was no longer a threat to the
sisters and their work.
Mother Katharine Drexel, as she was known in
her order, continued to guide the work of
the sisters until a heart attack in 1935
confined to her order’s headquarters until
her death in 1955. At that time her order
included 500 sisters teaching in 63 schools
through out the country.
During her lifetime Mother Drexel used some
$20 million of her family fortune to fund
the work of her order but that source ceased
at her death. At that time the remaining
funds in the trust set up by her father’s
will for his daughters were distributed to
various charities, as he had specified. One
biographer described Katharine’s purpose for
her inheritance, “In the Providence
of God, Katharine was to live until her
ninety-seventh year, and for the last ten
years of her life … to be the lone income
beneficiary of the will. She was to disburse
its benefactions to the Indian and Colored
races while she lived, and to instruct the
sisters of her Community to trust in the
Providence of God for His care …. She gave
it all, while she lived. Above all, she
counted on Divine Providence.”
Within a decade after Katharine’s death, the
church began the procedures to name her a
saint. She was beatified (the first step) in
1988 and then was canonized in October, 2000
as America’s second native-born saint.
Anne Adams, a freelance writer living in
Houston, Texas, is the author of a new
e-book “First of All, a Wife: Sketches of
American First Ladies,” available from
PCPublications.org. She has published in
Christian
and secular publications, taught history on
the junior college level,
and spoken at national and local writers'
conferences. Her book
"Brittany, Child of Joy", an account of her
severely retarded daughter,
was issued by Broadman Press in 1987. She
also publishes an
encouragement newsletter "Rainbows Along the
Way."
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