Feast day: March 3
St. Katharine Drexel
Philadelphia banking heiress who gave away a fortune (over $20 million then — hundreds of millions today) founding schools for Black and Native Americans, including Xavier University.
Katharine Drexel was born in 1858 into one of the wealthiest families in America, the daughter of a Philadelphia banker, and was raised amid great privilege — but also amid deep faith and remarkable charity, for her family quietly gave away vast sums and opened their own home three days a week to feed and aid the poor. When her parents died, Katharine and her sisters inherited an immense fortune.
Traveling in the American West, she was shaken by the desperate poverty and injustice suffered by Native Americans on the reservations, and she began pouring money into missions and schools for them. On a visit to Rome she begged Pope Leo XIII to send missionaries for these neglected peoples — and the pope startled her by answering, in effect, 'Why not become a missionary yourself?'
She took the challenge to heart. Renouncing the life of a wealthy heiress, she became a nun and in 1891 founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, an order dedicated to serving Native Americans and African Americans at a time of fierce racial prejudice and segregation. For the rest of her long life she devoted her entire inheritance — some twenty million dollars — and her own labors to the cause.
She founded and staffed dozens of schools and missions across the country, including Xavier University in New Orleans, the first Catholic university in the United States for Black students. She worked on until a heart attack forced her into two decades of quiet prayer before her death in 1955. Canonized in 2000, she is the second native-born American saint and a patron of racial justice and philanthropists.
When she asked Pope Leo XIII to send missionaries to Native Americans, he replied: 'Why not become a missionary yourself?' She did.
“The patient and humble endurance of the cross — whatever nature it may be — is the highest work we have to do.”
— St. Katharine Drexel
Image: User:Magicpiano (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
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