July 16, 2023 - "Saint Katherine Drexel"

We continue this series of columns on American Saints and Blesseds.  Our Saint of the day:  Saint Katharine Drexel.  She was born in Philadelphia.  Her father was an international banker and a member of one of the wealthiest families in the United States of America.  Katharine had an excellent education through private tutors and traveled widely as a young woman.  She learned the hard way that money could not buy safety from pain or death as she nursed her stepmother through a three-year-battle with a terminal illness.
 
Katharine had read Helen Hunt Jackson’s book on the plight of the American Indian:  A Century of Dishonor.  She was appalled by what she read.  This spurred her on to support missionary work among Native and African Americans.  While on a European tour in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Katharine met Pope Leo XIII and asked him to send more missionaries for her friend Bishop James O’Connor.  Pope Leo stunned her with his reply, “Why don’t you become a missionary?” Katharine had been thinking of religious life and was drawn to a contemplative order like the Discalced Carmelites.  When she discussed what Pope Leo had said with Bishop O’Connor, both of them prayed about it.  He made arrangements for her to receive her formation in religious life from the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh.  Bishop James O’Connor’s brother, Michael, was the first bishop of Pittsburgh.  Bishop Michael brought the Sisters of Mercy with him from Ireland when he began his work as Bishop of Pittsburgh in 1843.  When Katharine completed her novitiate with the Pittsburgh Sisters of Mercy, she (now known as Mother Katharine) and the pioneer Blessed Sacrament Sisters returned to Philadelphia. An experienced Sister of Mercy from Pittsburgh was sent to help Mother Katharine with the training of the young women who wanted to be Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.  This arrangement lasted for several years until Bishop James O’Connor and the Pittsburgh Sisters of Mercy were convinced Mother Katharine and the Sisters helping her govern the new community could manage things on their own.
 
After three and half years of training, Mother Katharine and her first band of Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament opened a boarding school in Santa Fe.  She insisted that her Sisters rely on alms while she reserved the trust money to fund such initiatives as the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions and Xavier University in New Orleans, the first Catholic College established for African American students.  When Mother Katharine learned that the Louisiana State Legislature resolutely refused to provide funding for public schools for African American students, she used her trust money to build a series of schools for African American students, trained teachers for these schools at Xavier University in New Orleans, and paid the salaries of the teacher.  The Blessed Sacrament Sisters occasionally were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan in various cities in the South.  On one occasion the Sisters were told to leave within a week after they arrived to begin a school or their building would be burnt to the ground and the Sisters would be tarred and feathered.  The Sisters prayed for God’s protection.  Their prayers were answered in a somewhat strange way.  A tornado came through the town.  The only building destroyed was the meeting hall of the Ku Klux Klan.  Several Klansmen were inside and killed when the building collapsed on top of them.  The Klan did not bother the Sisters any more after the tornado levelled their meeting hall.
 
Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia encouraged Mother Katharine to get her rule approved by Rome.  She was assisted in this process one day when she was visited by Mother Cabrini who came to thank the Blessed Sacrament Sisters for the hospitality that they had shown to Mother Cabrini’s Sisters when they had arrived in Philadelphia. Mother Cabrini advised Mother Katharine about the “politics” of getting her order’s rule approved by the Roman officials.  Archbishop Ryan agreed with Mother Cabrini’s advice to Mother Katharine.  Mother Katharine did what Mother Cabrini suggested, and the rule of her order was approved!
 
By 1942 Mother Katharine had a system of African American schools in thirteen states, plus forty mission centers and twenty-three rural schools.
 
When Mother Katharine was seventy-seven, she suffered a heart attack.  Her doctors recommended that she retire.  For the next twenty years she devoted herself to prayer for her Sisters and their apostolic work until her death at the age of ninety-seven on March 3, 1955.
 
The cause for canonization for Mother Katharine moved along rather quickly.  She was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II on November 20, 1988, after the first miracle through her intercession (the healing of the severe ear infection of teenager Robert Gutherman in 1974) was approved.  She was canonized on October 1, 2000, when her 1994 miracle of reversing the congenital deafness in two-year old Amy Wall was recognized as such by the Vatican Congregation for Saints.
 
Until next week,
Fr. John