St. Katharine Drexel

Katharine Drexel was born Catherine Mary Drexel on November 26, 1858, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into one of the wealthiest American families of the 19th century. Her father, Anthony Joseph Drexel, was a prominent financier and partner in the banking house Drexel, Morgan & Co. (the forerunner of the modern firm J.P. Morgan). Her mother, Hannah Jane Langstroth Drexel, died when Katharine was an infant, and her father later married Emma Bouvier. Katharine and her two sisters were raised partly under the influence of their stepmother and received a strong Catholic upbringing, including a period of instruction from the Jesuits at the family chapel. The Drexels were well known for their philanthropy, and Katharine grew up watching her father and stepmother distribute large sums to Catholic missions, hospitals, and Native American communities.

After her father died in 1893, Katharine and her sisters inherited a fortune estimated at roughly $14 million, and for a time they used their wealth to fund mission schools and churches across the country, particularly through the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. During a private audience with Pope Leo XIII in 1887, Katharine asked the pope to send more missionaries to Native Americans. The pope is said to have gently asked, 'Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?' Those words marked the beginning of her religious vocation.

Katharine entered the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh to undertake formal formation, and in 1891 she formally established her own religious congregation, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. She made her first vows in 1893 and her final vows in 1897. Under her leadership, the congregation opened schools and missions serving Native Americans and African Americans, eventually founding or supporting more than 60 schools across the United States. In 1925 she and her order founded Xavier University in New Orleans, the first Catholic historically Black and African American university in the United States. She personally funded much of the order's work, gradually distributing nearly her entire fortune to its mission.

Katharine suffered a serious heart attack in 1935 and lived the remaining twenty years of her life in religious retirement, in prayer and declining health. She died on March 3, 1955, in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, at the age of 96. Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1988, and she was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 1, 2000, becoming (after Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini) the second American-born citizen to be canonized in the Catholic Church. Her liturgical memorial is celebrated on March 3, and she is honored as a patron of racial justice and of philanthropists.

Her legacy endures through the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, through Xavier University, and through the many schools, missions, and Native American communities she supported. Katharine Drexel's life stands as a remarkable testimony to the consecration of wealth and privilege to the service of those whom society most often overlooked, and her example continues to inspire Catholics engaged in education, social justice, and reconciliation between peoples.