Sacred Mysteries: A life lived 'for Indians and Colored People'
In 1922, in Beaumont, Texas, the Ku Klux Klan posted a notice outside the church and new school built by Katharine Drexel. “We will not stand by while white priests consort with n----- wenches in the faces of our families. Suppress it in one week or flogging and tar and feathers will follow.” Days later, a tornado smashed the buildings used as Klan headquarters. The Klan never threatened the church in Beaumont again.
I don’t think this incident contributed to Katharine Drexel’s canonisation in 2000. The congregation she founded in 1891 had been called the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. Today, it is called the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and still works with what it now calls black and Native American people.
Katharine Drexel was the second person born in America to be canonised. Her day is March 3. Born in 1858, before the Civil War, she died in 1955. She and her two sisters were heiresses, sharing a $14 million legacy (perhaps $400 million in today’s values). As a child, she had seen her father, a banker, helping local people with clothes, food and rent. Her stepmother taught her: “Kindness may be unkind if it leaves a sting behind.”
Coming into her fortune on her father’s death in 1885, she set about giving away her income, $1,000 a day. She was moved by seeing hardship and injustice on Indian reservations in South Dakota and among the Chippewa and White Earth peoples. She was inspired too by a campaigning history of Native American tribes, A Century of Dishonor by Helen Hunt Jackson (1881). The heiress also centred a life of prayer on Christ in the Eucharist. She found in it the motive for self-denial and for helping minorities.
In 1887 she went to Rome and asked Pope Leo XIII for missionaries for the Native Americans. He asked: “Why not become a missionary yourself?” So in 1889, she joined the Daughters of Charity (known for their starched cornette wimples and realistic affinity for the poor). The deal was for her and 13 followers to learn the ropes for two years and then start their own congregation of nuns.
Mother Katharine was to establish 50 schools for black children and 12 for Native Americans. Black men could attend Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans from the early Twenties. In New Orleans, the St Katharine Drexel Prep marching band today joins the Mardi Gras parade.
Segregation was a fact in America during Katharine Drexel’s life. Rather than permit it among her nuns she paradoxically accepted only white sisters. Yet Native Americans were welcomed to her congregation. Not until 1950 did the first two African-American women enter the novitiate.
Researches by Cheryl Christine Dempsey Hughes show that in 1902, Katharine Drexel’s nuns numbered 104, increasing to a peak of 551 in 1965. Today, there are about 100, half retired. No novices apply.
In a way, Katharine Drexel planned to fail. She chose not to endow the congregation while it still received an income from the Drexel estate (which, by her father’s will, ended at her death). She believed that Providence would sustain her work, if it was God’s will.
In 1935, she had a heart attack and for her last 20 years happily relinquished control, devoting herself to contemplative prayer.
The mother house has been sold – after the saint’s remains were transferred to Philadelphia cathedral, where, as we report, it had also been planned to rebury the saintly Cornelia Connelly.
This month too a school and church at Lansford, Pennsylvania, were sold to the Catholic Worker movement, for a centre named after Dorothy Day. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People scarcely outlived the woman who became a saint through founding it.
