St. Katharine Drexel

Katherine Drexel was born on November 26, 1858 in Philadelphia. Five weeks after her birth, Katherine’s mother Hannah Drexel died. Katherine’s aunt and uncle took care of her and her sister Elizabeth until her father remarried in 1860. Her father’s new wife Emma Bouvier was a loving stepmother and the girls were raised in a devout, happy home. They soon welcomed a younger sister, Louise. Katherine’s father Francis Anthony Drexel was very wealthy. He and Emma taught their girls to share with the poor. Emma opened their home to the poor three days a week. Katherine and Elizabeth taught Sunday school classes at their summer home in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, where the local pastor Father James O’Connor became their friend and Katharine’s confessor. Emma developed cancer when Katherine was twenty-one and Katherine nursed her until her death three years later. Katherine was being drawn to a religious vocation, but Father O’Connor who was now a bishop, counseled her to wait and pray. When Francis Drexel suddenly died in 1885, he left his daughters the income from his estate. Katherine used her money to help Native Americans and African Americans. In 1887, Katherine had an audience with Pope Leo XIII. She asked him to send more priests to serve the American Indians, but he asked why she did not become a missionary herself. Katherine felt drawn to be a contemplative religious and had not considered being a missionary. Two years later, Bishop O’Connor advised Katharine to found an order to work with Black and Indian peoples. On February 12,1891, she pronounced her vows as a Sister of the Blessed Sacrament and the next year she founded St. Elizabeth’s convent and began a boarding school for black children. The congregation spread gradually and by 1902 had three schools on Indian reservations. In 1917, the sisters founded a school in New Orleans to train teachers; it became Xavier University in 1925. Katherine traveled widely helping to found new schools and convents, but for the last twenty years of her life, ill health forced her into a retired, contemplative lifestyle. She died March 3, 1955 and was canonized in 2000. The two miracles used for her beatification and canonization were cures of nerve deafness. Her feast day is March 3.