At the 1975 canonization of Elizabeth Seton, the first American-born
saint, Pope Paul VI remarked that the "temporal prosperity" of
the United States seems "to obscure and make almost impossible"
the renunciation of self and dedication to religion traditionally
found in the lives of those canonized by the Catholic church.
The material temptations of the "good life" as well as the complex
work, social and familial situations of this fast-paced nation
seem to leave little space for spiritual cultivation of any kind
-- let alone of sufficient magnitude to qualify for sainthood.
Katharine Drexel, the second native-born American so honored by
the church, faced the challenges of "temporal prosperity" to such
extremes as to make her canonization perhaps the most unlikely
of all.
The Oxford Dictionary of Saints describes Katharine
Drexel as a "long-lived American lady . . . often forgotten .
. . who devoted her life and considerable fortune to American
Indians and African Americans." Drexel was by turns heroic, complicated
and an absolute U.S. original -- a woman who was both saintly
in the traditional ways of spiritual and religious conviction,
and entirely effective within the legal, social and political
realities of her time and place. But she seems virtually anonymous
in U.S. history and in the day-to-day experience of the American
Catholic Church. This may in fact have been her wish, but she
is someone everyone in the United States, not just Catholics,
should recognize, admire and understand. Our society has yet to
resolve the issues to which she chose to dedicate her life and
resources, and there is much to learn from her actions and achievements.
* * *
Katharine Drexel was born on November 26, 1858, to Francis and
Hannah Langstroth Drexel, members of the extraordinarily wealthy
Drexel family of Philadelphia. Francis Drexel and his brother
Anthony were globally prominent investment bankers and business
partners of Junius and J.P. Morgan, the most powerful financiers
of the 19th century. The Drexels were involved with the financing
of the construction of the railroads, shipping canals and other
key components of the U.S. industrial revolution. Katharine was
the second daughter and, after the death of her mother when she
was 5 weeks old, was raised by a kind and devout stepmother, Emma
Bouvier. The Drexels lived in palatial comfort, at the pinnacle
of high society. But they were also known for their extensive
charity and philanthrophy: The second Mrs. Drexel yearly gave
away what today would be more than $11 million, regularly passed
out food and clothing to the city's poor directly from the family
mansion, and supported many other charities anonymously, activities
that had a lasting effect on the values and world-view of her
stepdaughter. As a child Katharine secretly gave away money and
was relieved that her father encouraged rather than chastised
her when he found out.
At age 14, the young heiress considered joining a convent. She
was discouraged by her parents, who wanted her to marry and have
children, and by her priest and spiritual adviser, Bishop James
O'Connor, who believed that a young woman so accustomed to wealth
and freedom would have trouble adjusting to convent life. Katherine
herself had doubts -- enduring trials of spirit which she set
forth in a series of eloquent, unsparingly honest journals and
letters. Among her reasons for questioning her fitness, she listed,
"I hate community life. . . . I'd hate never to be alone. I do
not know how I could bear the privations of poverty of the religious
life. I have never been deprived of luxuries."
When Katharine was 21 years old, Emma Bouvier Drexel developed
cancer, and in the three years before her death endured excruciating
pain. Rather than leading Katharine to question her faith, nursing
Mrs. Drexel and witnessing the intense physical hardship seems
to have deepened it. Katharine became convinced that suffering
was an inescapable part of the human condition and decided that
any truth which transcended suffering could be found only through
devotion to God. Following Emma's death, while on a trip out west
with her father, Katharine was profoundly disturbed by the appalling
conditions she witnessed on the government's poorly administered
Indian reservations. When she inherited money upon her father's
death in 1885, she began donating large sums toward bettering
the situation of Native Americans. She had become deeply concerned
as well with the plight of the recently freed African Americans,
particularly in the Deep South.
Through these interests her spiritual calling grew to outweigh
her self-doubts. She would write, "I didn't think of becoming
a religious until years after I'd become interested in missionary
work on the Indian reservations. It was long after I'd helped
build schools for Indians and Negroes, and endeavored to get priests
and nuns to do the work of religious training in those schools.
It suddenly seemed one night that something inside of me was saying,
'Why do you keep sending other people to do this great work for
you? Why don't you do it yourself?'"
* * *
In 1891, the same year her uncle Anthony founded the Drexel Institute
of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University), Katherine
Drexel took her final religious vows in an order she founded.
She called the order the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for
Indians and Colored People. Though she strongly felt the need
for a new order of nuns specifically devoted to African American
and Native American populations, she questioned her own fitness
for the role of Mother Superior: "The responsibility of such a
call almost crushes me," she wrote to Bishop O'Connor, "because
I am so infinitely poor in the virtues necessary." However, with
O'Connor's encouragement and his faith -- after her many years
of struggle -- in the strength of her calling, she agreed to head
her new order.
Today we most likely interpret the actions of someone who dedicates
herself to the cause of the betterment of racial minorities as
a kind of social worker. We might even disparage such a person
as naive, motivated by social pieties and the guilt of privilege.
Such simplifications fall away in the case of Drexel, who was,
first and foremost, a young woman completely immersed in her relationship
with God. She wanted to go as far as she could into that relationship
(her initial wish as a young adult had been to join a contemplative
and cloistered, rather than active, order), and her missionary
and social work grew from a desire to share with others what she
had found in her spiritual development.
This is a different motivation from that which is commonly seen
in our society's pursuit of social concerns. Understanding that
difference is crucial when studying her life. In Drexel's view,
it was not enough to provide money and material relief. As she
understood things, there was to be no peace in life without God,
and she believed that the disregarded African and Native American
populations could not be fully emancipated and equal members of
society until they knew religion -- until they had fully experienced
for themselves God's love and liberation, just as she had. And
to know religion, she reasoned, they had to be educated.
Drexel was a revolutionary -- but a quiet one. She and her initial
group of 15 nuns founded an Indian school in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
in 1893 and founded several others in the years that followed.
She faced bitter opposition from within and outside the Catholic
church. Inside the church of that time, as Father Joseph Martino
-- the priest assigned by the Vatican to write the positio
arguing for her canonization -- noted, "most Catholic priests
abhorred working with Blacks because of racial prejudice." Martino
summarizes at length a letter written to the Holy See by a Belgian
missionary to the American South in the early 1900s, stating that
"Black girls were denied admission to convents, and there were
also girls who had been expelled from religious communities, even
years after, once it was discovered that they were actually Black."
Opposition from the outside was even more intense. The main
center for the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Bensalem, Pennsylvania,
received a bomb threat when it was under construction. One of
the buildings of a school in Rock Castle, Virginia, was destroyed
by arson in 1899; in Texas, in 1922, the Ku Klux Klan threatened
to burn down another of Drexel's schools. Countless similar threats
were received and summarily ignored as the Sisters of the Blessed
Sacrament persisted in their work.
Operating in the segregated South, Mother Katharine never called
directly for the overthrow of the Jim Crow legal system. Instead
she followed a hard-headed and pragmatic strategy that was probably
the only one, in that social era and context, which had any possibility
of working: "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." Nominally
living within the laws of the jurisdictions where they found themselves,
the sisters insisted, in the work and practices of the order,
on the equal worth of every individual. It was customary in Catholic
churches in the South to make blacks stand or sit in roped-off
areas at the rear. Following Drexel's orders, the churches connected
to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament offered two rows of pews
running from front to back, one for blacks and one for whites,
side by side. This small step in the direction of equality gave
segregationist authorities no statutory grounds for closing the
churches down. When confronted with intense resistance in certain
locales to the opening of schools for African Americans, the sisters
quietly put in practice another of Christ's maxims, "Be as wise
as serpents and as gentle as doves." They utilized shell corporations
and other legal maneuvering to purchase land anonymously and circumvent
opposition.
The simultaneous delicacy of spirit and iron force of will evinced
in Drexel's life and work are stunning. From its modest beginnings
of a small number of schools and missions, the Sisters of the
Blessed Sacrament were able to train teachers from the disadvantaged
groups who then went out to found new schools and teach others.
Drexel's insight in setting in motion a process of teachers creating
teachers and community leaders in an ever-expanding pool of educated
men and women amounts to a kind of genius. It is one of the most
long-lasting and solid foundations that has been built in the
attempt to provide assistance to African and Native Americans.
The order was ultimately responsible for founding 145 missions,
12 schools for Native Americans and 50 schools for African Americans.
* * *
Katharine Drexel, who died in 1955 at age 96, did not wish to
be considered for canonization. Canonization requires significant
amounts of money for research and documentation, and she, according
to Making Saints by Kenneth L. Woodward '57, believed
"the money required for the process would be better spent on helping
Indians and blacks." Her cause, however, had such enormous support,
including from many of those who had been educated at her schools,
that the process was set in motion. Canonization requires extensive
documentation of miracles performed through prayer to the individual
in question; in Drexel's case, two deaf individuals regained their
hearing in ways inexplicable to doctors. But by far the greatest
miracle, as Pope John Paul II emphasized in his homily at her
canonization Mass in 2000, lay in what she accomplished during
her life.
Xavier University in New Orleans stands as perhaps the most
notable testament to the force of Katharine Drexel's vision. Xavier
was founded in 1915 through an initial grant of $750,000 from
Drexel. The only historically black and Catholic college in the
United States, Xavier was -- according to nuns of her order --
one of the projects closest to Drexel's heart. Xavier began with
a small collection of buildings on the grounds of what had previously
been a high school; today it has grown to house more than 3,800
students. The New York Times Selective Guide to Colleges
describes Xavier as "a school where achievement has been the rule
and beating the odds against success a routine occurrence."
Xavier currently places more African Americans into medical
schools than any other college in the nation. It awards more degrees
than does any other college to African Americans in biology and
the life sciences, in the physical sciences, and in physics. Its
prominent graduates have included Alvin Boutte, class of 1951,
founder and CEO of Indecorp hotels; Louis Castenall, class of
'68, dean of the University of Cincinnati's College of Education,
praised by The New York Times and The Washington
Post for his innovations in teacher education; and Alexis
Herman, class of '69, the first black U.S. secretary of labor.
With its stated mission of preparing students "to assume roles
of leadership and service in society," Xavier has graduated countless
others who have led in smaller but deeply significant ways in
their local communities, among them physician Regina Benjamin,
class of '79, who returned to her home region of Bayou La Batre,
Alabama, to found a health clinic dedicated to serving people
who lacked the money to afford health care. She financed the clinic
herself for over a decade by moonlighting in the ERs of local
hospitals.
* * *
Drexel's emphasis on the central importance of equal education
holds key lessons for a society that is -- as Pope John Paul II
stated at her canonization Mass -- still torn apart in many ways
by issues of race. The ripple effects of Drexel's work can never
precisely be measured or calculated, but it is hard to imagine
that even she could have predicted these effects. Then again,
given the central mystery of a life of faith in any age, particularly
ours, perhaps it is not so hard. She once wrote of her mission,
"I looked up in wonder at God's wonderful ways and thought, How
little we imagine what may be the result of listening and acting
on a desire He puts into the heart. He will bless it, if we try
to act upon it."
She made one request at Xavier University's dedication ceremony:
that her own name not be mentioned. She watched, unmentioned and
unremarked, from a seat at the back of the auditorium.
Anthony Walton is the co-author, with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
of Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank
Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes. He teaches at Bowdoin
College, Brunswick, Maine.
(October 2004)
