Katharine Mary Drexel

         Katharine Mary Drexel was the first person born a United States citizen to be canonized a saint.  In 1858, in Philadelphia, Francis Drexel and Hannah Langstroth had their second child.  Just five weeks after Katharine's birth, her mother died. For the next two years, she and her sister Elizabeth lived with her uncle Anthony Drexel, the founder of Drexel University, and his wife Ellen.  Katharine and Elizabeth went to live with their father again after he got remarried, in 1860, to Emma Bouvier.  Another sister, Louise, was born three years later.

         The Drexels were a wealthy banking family, but also a religious one that taught their daughters that they were only stewards of the wealth they had been given. The girls had private tutors and got to travel extensively in the United States and Europe. Multiple times each week Emma would open the Drexel family home to the poor. Katherine and her sisters would assist in serving them.  When at the family's summer home in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, Katharine would teach Sunday school to children of employees of her family and the local area.

         It was in Torresdale that Katharine first met Father James O'Connor, who would become her spiritual director and play a significant role in her vocation. Soon after they met, O'Connor was ordained Bishop of Nebraska, with pastoral responsibility for an area that extended beyond Nebraska to Colorado, Wyoming, and parts of Utah, North and South Dakota, and Montana. He sought financial support from the Drexel family to help with providing care to Native Americans.  Traveling with her family in the Western and Southern United States, Katharine saw the hardships and injustices suffered by Native Americans and African Americans and was moved to want to help. As a layperson she began to provide support for the missions serving these communities. In 1886, she secured an audience with Pope Leo XIII to beg him to send priests to the missions. To her surprise, Pope Leo XIII encouraged her to become a missionary herself. Katharine had felt a call to contemplative life but had doubts. She spoke with Bishop O'Connor who confirmed her in her call to religious life but also encouraged her to found a new order specifically to serve Native Americans and African Americans, saying he “was never so sure of any vocation, not even [his] own,” and that to ignore it would be to “pass an opportunity of doing immense service to the Church which may not occur again.”  After making a retreat on the Feast of St. Joseph, Katharine concluded it was God's will.

         In May 1889, at the age of 29, Katharine entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the purpose of ultimately founding a new order.  On February 12,1891, back in Philadelphia, before the archbishop, Mother Katharine professed her vows and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament were born. In addition to the typical vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, she added a fourth vow of service to the “Indian and Black races”.  The congregation founded and ran schools for Native Americans and African Americans across the county. Mother Katharine poured her financial inheritance into the work as well.  In 1915, Mother Katharine arrived in New Orleans in response to an appeal by the archbishop. Among other things, she  built Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically Black and Catholic university in the United States. By the end of her life, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament numbered around 400 and had established near 60 schools and missions in 17 states where they provided education, social services, and visited those in need, including those in hospitals and prisons.  Mother Katharine did not limit her financial support to the work of her order. When no one else would, she assisted Mother Loyola of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine de’ Ricci in caring for orphans in Cuba.  She corresponded with Augustus Tolton (also featured on American Saints and Causes) and assisted him financially in his missionary work to serve the African American Catholic community in Chicago.

         Mother Katharine served as Superior General of her order until 1937, when declining health forced her to retire. Katharine spent the final 18 years of her life in contemplative prayer and adoration at the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. She was 96 when she died on March 3, 1955.

         As reflected in the name of the order she founded, Katharine had a profound love for the Eucharist. Her Eucharistic perspective on the unity of all in Christ shaped her desire to reach Native Americans and African Americans and to speak up and address the injustices she saw.

         The National Shrine of Saint Katharine Drexel is located within the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Pilgrims can pray before her remains which are entombed in the Cathedral.