Finally, after 335 years of living in the United States, racial discrimination against African-Americans was declared illegal. Mother Katharine’s schools, teachings and example helped to lead the way to de-segregation and the Civil Rights Movement that followed it.
The Contemplative Life
In the fall of 1935, after a series of visitations to her missions, Mother Katharine suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage in St. Louis. She was advised to change her lifestyle, end her visitations and curtail her activities. With great reluctance, she agreed and returned to the Motherhouse in Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania. She said, “Nobody is necessary for God’s work. God can do the work without any of His creatures.” Her sister Louise wrote, “Truly the zeal of God’s house has consumed Mother. It is well nigh impossible in the span of our life to cover such a vast extent of ground and influence so many lives.”
Mother was confined for her last 20 years to two rooms on the second floor of the Motherhouse. She lived a life of prayer, penance and writing in her wheelchair. She prayed at daily Mass and daily two complete Rosaries of 30 mysteries, many Stations of the Cross, hours of meditation and countless litanies and ejaculations. Her wheelchair and writing evidenced her penitential poverty. The wheelchair was a makeshift thing consisting of a pupil’s desk fastened to wheels. She wrote letters giving guidelines for her sisters on scraps of paper with pencils that she sharpened down to the erasers. By God’s providence, Mother Katharine had become the contemplative nun that she always wanted to be.
On the morning of March 3, 1955, Mother Katherine suddenly opened her eyes from her bed, looked straight ahead, closed them again, gave a sigh and breathed her last at the age of 96.
Mother Katharine’s friend, Helen Grace Smith, stood by her coffin and said, “Her love of personal poverty made her oblivious to comfort of any kind. She went long distances, in all kinds of conveyances, and often walking when there was no other way, and she went simple, silent and unknown.”
Bishop Joseph McShea, Auxiliary Bishop of Philadelphia, preached the funeral that was attended by 250 Bishops, priests and brothers. He said, “The beloved soul of Mother Katharine was activated, inspired and impelled by an insatiable love of God and by complete subjection to His adorable Will. Hers was not a humanitarianism that stops where true love should begin. She was not a mere social reformer, educator or philanthropist striving to better the condition of her fellow man while permitting him to ignore God.” Mother was a true missionary with a contemplative heart and true love of God and neighbor.
Six pallbearers carried out her coffin. Fittingly, two were White, two were African-American and two were Native Americans. Her coffin was interred in a crypt underneath the chapel at the Motherhouse in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.
Mother Drexel’s long life was framed by the Civil War and the Korean War. It included the Industrial Revolution, the Centennial Year of the Declaration of Independence and the Atomic Age.
In her lifetime, Mother spent millions of dollars from the income of the Drexel Trust Fund and used it to establish 60 institutions to care for the education of 25,000 Native and African Americans. She started with 13 Sisters who grew to 503 at the time of her death. She founded 49 convents for her Sisters, set up training courses for catechists and teachers, established 12 schools for Native Americans and nearly 100 schools in rural areas and inner cities of the South to educate African-Americans. She founded Xavier University the first Catholic university predominantly for African-Americans in the Western Hemisphere. The schools and the Sisters who staffed them influenced generations of students, their parents and their communities.
At the time of Mother Drexel’s death, there were more than 500 Sisters teaching in 63 schools in the United States. Soon after her death, the American Civil Rights Movement began to bring equal justice under the law to all. She was a true Americ