St. Katharine Drexel

St. Katharine Drexel was born on November 26, 1858, in Philadelphia, the second daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel, one of the wealthiest bankers in America. Her stepmother, Emma Bouvier Drexel, opened the family home to the poor three days a week, and her father prayed daily; from them Katharine learned that wealth was a trust to be shared. Nursing her stepmother through a long terminal illness also taught her that no fortune could purchase safety from suffering. Travels in the American West awakened her to the poverty and neglect endured by Native Americans, and she began funding schools and missions on reservations. During a private audience in 1887, when she asked Pope Leo XIII to send missionaries to the Indian missions she was supporting, he replied by asking why she did not become a missionary herself. After prayer and spiritual direction she renounced plans for marriage and society life, entered religious formation in 1889, and in 1891 founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a congregation dedicated to serving Black and Native Americans, united to a deep devotion to the Eucharist. Over the following decades Mother Drexel devoted her personal fortune—estimated at some twenty million dollars—to founding and staffing schools and missions across the country: dozens of schools on reservations and in rural and urban Black communities, and in 1925 Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, the first Catholic university in the United States founded for African Americans. She pressed on despite threats and opposition in an era of entrenched segregation, quietly insisting on the equal dignity of every person. After a severe heart attack in 1935 she spent her final two decades in prayerful retirement, the contemplative life she had always desired, dying at the motherhouse in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, on March 3, 1955, at ninety-six. Katharine Drexel was beatified in 1988 and canonized by Pope St. John Paul II on October 1, 2000, becoming only the second canonized saint born in the United States. Her feast is March 3, and she is invoked as a patron of racial justice and of philanthropists. Her tomb, long at the sisters' motherhouse shrine in Bensalem, was transferred in 2018 to the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, where pilgrims venerate her today.