Saint Katharine Drexel used her wealth to advance the kingdom of God on earth
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Again, I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and said, “Who then can be saved?”
Jesus looked at them and said, “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” Matthew 19: 23-26
Fabulously wealthy Katharine Drexel would enter the kingdom of God by using her wealth to advance the kingdom of God on earth by serving the “least” and most marginalized among us.
Katharine Mary Drexel was born into a very wealthy family in Philadelphia, the second child of investment banker Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth. Her mother died four weeks after her birth.
Katharine’s family took the scriptural injunctions to assist the poor quite seriously. Three times a week, the Drexel family distributed food, clothing, and rent assistance to the poor from their family home in Philadelphia. When poor women were ashamed to ask for assistance, the family was known to seek them out. As Emma Bouvier Drexel, Katharine’s stepmother, taught her daughters, “Kindness may be unkind if it leaves a sting behind.” [1]
As a youngster, Katharine enjoyed playing in the ocean waters of Long Branch, NJ, then a Gilded Age resort for the One Percent. Katharine and her family traveled to the Monmouth County beach town most summers, often staying at publisher George Childs’ chalet-like cottage, called Sea Cliff Villa, next to the house where President Ulysses S. Grant spent his vacations.
During the late 1800s, the town was known as the nation’s summer capital. Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Chester Arthur vacationed there. President James Garfield died there. Actors Lily Langtry and Edwin Booth (half-brother of John Wilkes Booth), Pullman railroad car mogul George Pullman, and financier “Diamond Jim” Brady also vacationed there.
The Long Branch cottage that would eventually become the Stella Maris Retreat Center was more than the place where Katharine hobnobbed with presidents and business moguls.[2] It was the quiet spot for contemplation where Drexel considered trading in her material wealth for what the Bible calls spiritual treasures in heaven. While she was staying at the cottage, she wrote to Bishop James O’Conner, a Philadelphia priest and long-time family friend who served as her spiritual director: “I am not happy in the world. There is a void in my heart that only God can fill.”[3] From 1876 to 1885, O’Connor served as vicar apostolic of Nebraska. In that year he became bishop of Omaha. He died in 1890.
Katharine Drexel made her social debut at the age of 20 in 1878. Shortly after, she watched her stepmother, Emma, struggle with cancer until her death in 1883. This made her realize that even the vast Drexel fortune could not buy safety from pain or death.
Her life soon made a profound turn. In 1884, the year after her stepmother’s death, she and her family travelled to the West. There, Katharine saw the plight and destitution of the Native Americans. She wanted to do something serious to help and began her lifelong personal and financial support of numerous missions and missionaries in the United States. Her father died the next year, 1885. Shortly afterwards, Katharine and her sisters began to contribute money to assist St. Francis Mission on South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation.
When, after her father’s death, Katharine wrote to Bishop O’Connor of her desire to join a contemplative order, the bishop suggested, “Wait a while longer……. Wait and pray.”[4] Katharine and her sisters, Elizabeth, and Louise, were still mourning their father when they sailed to Europe in 1886. Their high-powered banker father left behind a $15.5 million estate and instructions to divide it among his three daughters after expenses and specific charitable donations. The three sisters received the income produced by $14 million, or about $1,000 a day for each woman. In current dollars, the estate would be worth about $400 million, and the income about $30,000 per day, nearly $12 million per year.
In January 1887, the sisters were received in a private audience by Pope Leo XIII. They asked him to send missionaries to staff the Indian missions that they had been financing. To their surprise, the Pope suggested that Katharine become a missionary herself. Although Drexel had already received marriage proposals, “…after consultation with her spiritual director, Bishop James O’Connor, she made the decision to give herself totally to God, along with her inheritance, through service to American Indians and Afro-Americans.” [5]
Her uncle, Anthony Drexel, together with many friends, tried to dissuade her from religious life, but, in May 1889, she began a six-month postulancy in the Sisters of Mercy convent in Pittsburgh. Philadelphia high society was shocked! The Philadelphia Public Ledger carried a banner headline: “Miss Drexel Enters a Catholic Convent—Gives Up Seven Million.”[6]
On Feb. 12, 1891, Katharine Drexel professed her first vows as a religious, dedicating herself to work among the American Indians and African Americans in the western and southwestern United States. She took the name Mother Katharine, and, joined by thirteen other women, soon established the sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. In 1892, the sisters moved into St. Elizabeth’s Convent, built from the proceeds of her inheritance. A few months later, the sisters moved into a new motherhouse in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. In the first of many incidents that indicated Drexel’s convictions for social justice, and her desire to serve African Americans, were not shared by all, a stick of dynamite was discovered near the site.[7]
Requests for help and advice came to Mother Katharine from various parts of the United States. In 1895, she and her sisters opened a boarding school, Saint Catherine’s Indian School, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1897, Mother Drexel purchased and then donated a 160-acre tract of land to staff a Franciscan mission among the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico. A few years later, she also helped finance the work of the friars among the Pueblo Native Americans in New Mexico. In 1910, Drexel financed the printing of 500 copies of A Navaho-English Catechism of Christian Doctrine for the Use of Navaho Children.
In all, this amazing woman established 145 missions, 50 schools for African Americans, and 12 schools for Native Americans. Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically black Catholic college in the United States, also owes its existence to Drexel and the Sisters.
Mother Katharine Drexel died at the age of 96, on March 3, 1955, at her order’s motherhouse in Cornwells Heights, Pa. Pope John Paul II formally declared Drexel “Venerable” on Jan. 26, 1987 and beatified her on Nov. 20, 1988. Mother Drexel was canonized on Oct. 1, 2000.
A few closing notes:
- Katharine Drexel was the second American-born person to be canonized.
- She was the first born as an American citizen to be canonized. Elizabeth Seton was an American, but was born as a subject of King George III in 1774.
- Katharine Drexel was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2011.
- Mother Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini was acquainted with Mother Saint Katharine Drexel and advised Drexel about the “politics” of getting her new Order’s Rule approved by the Vatican bureaucracy in Rome.[7]
- Katharine Drexel’s stepmother, Emma, was a descendent of Michel Bouvier, a French cabinetmaker, who came to the United States in the early 19th century. Another of Michel Bouvier’s descendants was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
- The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Peace, who owned and operated the retreat center since the early 1940s, sold it in 2017 for $18.5 million.
- Don’t Mess with the Sisters!
There is a wonderful story about the Saint Katharine’s Sisters that even may be true.
The Ku Klux Klan hated Catholics almost as much as they hated African Americans. The spectacle of Catholic Sisters serving African Americans enraged them. In 1922, the Klan targeted one of the Sisters’ schools in Beaumont, Texas. They threatened to tar and feather the white pastor at the school and bomb his church.
What did the sisters do? They prayed, of course!
According to the story, the nuns prayed, and a few days later, a tornado came and destroyed the headquarters of the KKK, killing two of their members.
The Sisters never were threatened again.
Msgr. Robert J. Wister, Hist.Eccl.D. is a retired professor of church history at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology, Seton Hall University, and writes historical articles for the publications of the Archdiocese of Newark.
[1] Peter Finney Jr., “The Legacy of Saint Katharine Drexel”, St. Anthony Messenger; October 2000.
[2] Philadelphia Inquirer, March 21, 2019, https://www.inquirer.com/news/saint-katharine-drexel-stella-maris-sea-cliffs-george–20190321.html
[3] Philadelphia Inquirer, February 27, 2019, https://www.inquirer.com/news/katharine-drexel-saint-20190227.html
[4] Peter Finney Jr., “The Legacy of Saint Katharine Drexel”, St. Anthony Messenger; October 2000.
[5] Katharine Drexel: 1858-1955, Vatican News Service.
[6] https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-katharine-drexel/
[7] Peter Finney Jr., “The Legacy of Saint Katharine Drexel”, St. Anthony Messenger; October 2000.
