Katharine Drexel

Katharine Drexel was born November 26, 1858, in Philadelphia, the daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth. Her mother died shortly after her birth, and she was raised — along with her sisters — by her father and his second wife, Emma Bouvier, whose practice of distributing food and money to the poor at their Walnut Street home gave Katharine her earliest education in practical charity. The family was deeply Catholic, wealthy, and serious about both. In the 1880s a trip west confronted her with the condition of Native American communities — dispossessed, impoverished, and largely unreached by Catholic mission work. The experience broke open her sense of vocation. At a private audience with Pope Leo XIII in 1886, she pressed him to send more missionaries west; he asked her why she did not go herself. She could not dismiss the question. Three years later, in 1889, she entered the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh to begin her novitiate. In February 1891 she founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People — a new congregation with a specific mandate at a moment when most American institutions, including many Catholic ones, accepted the logic of segregation. She served as Superior General for forty-six years, personally directing and largely financing the congregation's expansion across the country. By the time illness forced her retirement in 1937, the Sisters had established more than sixty missions and schools. Her most enduring institution is Xavier University of Louisiana, which she founded in New Orleans in 1915. It remains the only historically Black and Catholic university in the United States. Drexel funded it, as she funded virtually everything her congregation built, from the Drexel family inheritance — an estate that, under the terms of her father's will, reverted to charity upon her death anyway. She spent it before it could sit idle. She died on March 3, 1955 — the same date as her feast day — at the motherhouse of her congregation in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. She had spent her final eighteen years in the contemplative prayer that had always anchored her active work. Pope John Paul II beatified her on November 20, 1988, recognizing the healing of teenager Robert Gutherman's severe ear infection as her first miracle. On October 1, 2000, she was canonized following the verified reversal of congenital deafness in two-year-old Amy Wall. She was the second person born in the United States to be declared a saint and the first who was born a U.S. citizen.