St. Katharine Drexel

St. Katharine Drexel - Feast Day: March 3

If you inherited millions of dollars, what would you do with it?  Saint Katharine Drexel put her money where her faith was.

St. Katharine was born into one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest families in 1858. Her father and uncle were bankers and financiers; her uncle founded Drexel University. Katharine and her sisters, Elizabeth and Louise, were brought up in a devout Catholic home where they learned to use their wealth to serve the poor. The Drexels did not merely write checks; they opened their mansion three days a week to distribute food and clothing to the poor, and they taught Sunday school to the children of employees and neighbors at their summer home in rural Pennsylvania.

By the time she was 21, Katharine felt called to religious life, but her spiritual director urged her to wait. Katharine did not wait idly. When bishops at the Third Plenary Council held in Baltimore in 1884 asked the Drexel family to help support the Native American missions, Katharine visited reservations to see what was needed. She then used her own money to build schools and churches, supply food and clothing, and pay teachers and priests. She also turned her attention to the educational needs of African Americans in the south and east, building schools to educate children. When Katharine’s father died in 1885, she inherited millions of dollars which she used to continue her charitable work. Having visited the Dakotas and witnessing the poverty of Native Americans there, she built a dozen schools for Native American children and more than 100 rural and inner city schools.

Katharine traveled to Rome in 1887, and in a private audience with Pope Leo XIII, asked him to send nuns and missionaries to help staff her mission schools. The pope challenged her to give her life as well as her money to helping the people she loved. Two years later, Katharine took vows as a novice with the Sisters of Mercy, then went on to found her own order. On February 12, 1891, Sr. Katharine and 13 companions became the first Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indian and Colored People, now the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

In 1917, she established a school to prepare African American students to become teachers. In 1925, the school was chartered as Xavier University of New Orleans, the only historically Black and Catholic college in the United States

She led her order for more than 40 years, but following a heart attack in 1935, which limited her missionary travel, she retired to a life of prayer.

Mother Katharine Drexel died March 3, 1955, and was canonized in October 2000, only 45 years after her death. 

She is the patron of home missions.

Read more (Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament - External Link)

Courtesy of: Elizabeth Johnson from FAITH Catholic and USCCB