I found this brief biog on the Vatican website:http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20001001_katharine-drexel_en.html
KATHARINE DREXEL (1858-1955)
Born in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, in the United States of America, on November 26, 1858, Katharine
Drexel was the second daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth.
Her father was a well known banker and philanthropist. Both parents instilled in
their daughters the idea that their wealth was simply loaned to them and was to
be shared with others.
When the family took a
trip to the Western part of the United States, Katharine, as a young woman, saw
the plight and destitution of the native Indian-Americans. This experience
aroused her desire to do something specific to help alleviate their condition.
This was the beginning of her lifelong personal and financial support of
numerous missions and missionaries in the United States. The first school she
established was St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1887).
Later, when visiting
Pope Leo XIII in Rome, and asking him for missionaries to staff some of the
Indian missions that she as a lay person was financing, she was surprised to
hear the Pope suggest that she become a missionary herself. 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.
Her wealth was now
transformed into a poverty of spirit that became a daily constant in a life
supported only by the bare necessities. On February 12, 1891, she professed her
first vows as a religious, founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament whose
dedication would be to share the message of the Gospel and the life of the
Eucharist among American Indians and Afro-Americans.
Always a woman of
intense prayer, Katharine found in the Eucharist the source of her love for the
poor and oppressed and of her concern to reach out to combat the effects of
racism. Knowing that many Afro-Americans were far from free, still living in
substandard conditions as sharecroppers or underpaid menials, denied education
and constitutional rights enjoyed by others, she felt a compassionate urgency to
help change racial attitudes in the United States.
The plantation at that
time was an entrenched social institutionin which the coloured people continued
to be victims of oppression. This was a deep affront to Katharine's sense of
justice. The need for quality education loomed before her, and she discussed
this need with some who shared her concern about the inequality of education for
Afro-Americans in the cities. Restrictions of the law also prevented them in the
rural South from obtaining a basic education.
Founding and staffing
schools for both Native Americans and Afro-Americans throughout the country
became a priority for Katharine and her congregation. During her lifetime, she
opened, staffed and directly supported nearly 60 schools and missions,
especially in the West and Southwest United States. Her crowning educational
focus was the establishment in 1925 of Xavier University of Louisiana, the only
predominantly Afro-American Catholic institution of higher learning in the
United States. Religious education, social service, visiting in homes, in
hospitals and in prisons were also included in the ministries of Katharine and
the Sisters.
In her quiet way,
Katharine combined prayerful and total dependence on Divine Providence with
determined activism. Her joyous incisiveness, attuned to the Holy Spirit,
penetrated obstacles and facilitated her advances for social justice. Through
the prophetic witness of Katharine Drexel's initiative, the Church in the United
States was enabled to become aware of the grave domestic need for an apostolate
among Native Americans and Afro-Americans. She did not hesitate to speak out
against injustice, taking a public stance when racial discrimination was in
evidence.
For the last 18 years
of her life she was rendered almost completely immobile because of a serious
illness. During these years she gave herself to a life of adoration and
contemplation as she had desired from early childhood. She died on March 3,
1955.
Katharine left a
four-fold dynamic legacy to her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who continue
her apostolate today, and indeed to all peoples:
– her love for the
Eucharist, her spirit of prayer, and her Eucharistic perspective on the unity of
all peoples;
– her undaunted spirit
of courageous initiative in addressing social iniquities among minorities — one
hundred years before such concern aroused public interest in the United
States;
– her belief in the
importance of quality education for all, and her efforts to achieve it;
– her total giving of
self, of her inheritance and all material goods in selfless service of the
victims of injustice.
Katharine Drexel
was beatified by Pope John Paul II on
November 20, 1980.
