Katherine Drexel

This weekend we have our annual collection for the Black and Indian Mission Office.  Many of us will give without any idea of what the Mission Office does or how intimately our Archdiocese is connected with Saint Katherine Drexel, the foundress of this mission.

Saint Katherine grew up in a wealthy family in Philadelphia.  Weekly her family distributed food, clothing and rent assistance to those in need.  In her early 20’s she watched her stepmother suffer and die from terminal cancer and learned that money could not buy safety from pain or death.  At that point, her life took on new meaning as she decided to use her wealth to help others in greater ways than her family had previously done. 

Moved by stories of how American Indians were being treated, she began to pray about ways to help them.  After her father’s death, and with his considerable fortune at her command, she traveled to the Western U.S. where she saw first-hand the destitution of Native Americans.  It was then that she began her lifelong financial support of Indian missions and missionaries.

During a private audience with Pope Leo XIII, she asked him to send missionaries to staff the missions she had been financing.  To her surprise, the Pope suggested that Katherine become a missionary herself.  At the age of 31 she entered the Sisters of Mercy.  Two years later she and thirteen other women established their own religious order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, dedicating themselves to help American Indians and Afro-Americans in the western and southwestern parts of the country.

In 1897 Saint Katherine, then known as Mother Drexel, opened a boarding school for Native Americans in Santa Fe.  She secured a 160-acre tract of land in the Navajo nation and convinced Franciscan Friars from Cincinnati to move here to care for the Navajo peoples.  A few years later she financed the Friars as they began to work with the Pueblos.  The Friars she first brought to New Mexico are still ministering in the Archdiocese today.

Knowing that many Afro-Americans were far from free, still living as sharecroppers, being denied education and constitutional rights, she turned her sights on helping to change racial attitudes.  At the turn of the 20th century, at both the height of Jim Crow laws and anti-Catholic sentiment in the Southern U.S., she fought a law in Georgia that prevented white teachers from teaching black children.  She purchased an abandoned university building in New Orleans and opened a Preparatory school which later became Xavier University, the first university for Black people in the country.

Mother Katherine Drexel entered eternal life in 1955 and was named a saint on October 1, 2000.  Her work assisting native and Afro-Americans continues today.  The Black and Indian Missions Office carries on the tradition of Saint Katherine by providing support to religious communities who help with evangelization and religious education – especially to mission communities.

As Saint Katherine said, “We believe God calls us to be a sign in the world of the power of Christ.”