Saint Katharine Drexel

Today the Church celebrates the memory of Saint Katharine Drexel (1858-1955).

She was born in Philadelphia, PA, on 26 November 1858. Her father, Francis Anthony Drexel, was a well known banker and philanthropist. Both of 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 destitution of the Native Americans. This experience stirred her to want 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 Saint Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, NM, in 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 Native and African-Americans.

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 African-Americans were far from free, still living in substandard conditions as sharecroppers or underpaid menials, being 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 institution in which blacks 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 African 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 and African-Americans throughout the country became a priority for Katharine and her congregation. During her lifetime, she opened, staffed, and directly supported nearly sixty 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 African-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. 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 and African-Americans. She did not hesitate to speak out against injustice, taking a public stance when racial discrimination was in evidence.

For the last eighteen 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 3 March 1955.

(The above is an edited excerpt from her Vatican biography, which may be accessed at  Vatican: Katharine Drexel (1858-1955)).

For more information about Saint Katharine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, please visit:

Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament