Today is the feast day of St. Katharine Drexel. In the summer of 1886, she sailed to Europe with her sisters. Katharine sought help from European monasteries to send priests to help Native Americans in the West. However, none of them would make such a commitment. So, she decided to ask the Pope. She pleaded with him for missionary priests for the Indians. To her astonishment, he responded, “Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?”
Years later, Katharine told her Sisters that once she left the Holy Father, she could not get away from the Vatican fast enough. When she got outside she sobbed and sobbed. She was initially frightened at the implications of the Pope’s words. But slowly, after prayer and spiritual direction, she accepted his advice and gave up the idea of a contemplative vocation.
Katharine decided to found her own order. She wrote to her spiritual director, Bishop O’Connor, in humility, “The Feast of St. Joseph brought me the grace to give the remainder of my life to the Indians and Colored, to enter fully and entirely into your views and those of Reverend Stephan as to what is best for the salvation of the souls of these people.”
When she entered the convent, a Philadelphia newspaper wrote, “[She has taken] her first step yesterday in the renunciation of the world, with all that it contains of family, brilliant associations, and great wealth. One of America’s greatest heiresses [will be] laying aside all that so many thousands live for and adopting a new life as opposite as can be well imagined from that which she might be supposed to favor.” Archbishop Ryan reconciled her vow of poverty and her fortune by saying, “You can retain the possession and the administration, but you have to promise in case of my requiring it, that you would renounce your possessions.”
Sister Katharine always found in the Eucharist the source of her love for the poor and the oppressed and the inspiration to combat the effects of racism. The Eucharist was at the heart of her spirituality. Her love and devotion to Jesus was expressed in the union of adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament with active service for the good of others, giving of herself and everything she possessed.
“The spirit of the Eucharist consists in the donation of one’s own being,” she wrote. In order to point out the central nucleus of the charism of the congregation she founded, she wrote to her Sisters, “Get up after receiving Holy Communion and go find Him in the people. Everything you do for the people, you do for Him.”
On February 12, 1891, Sister Mary Katharine Drexel was professed as the first Sister of the new missionary congregation, The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
Over the next 42 years, Mother Katharine made many missionary journeys, established many missions, schools and convents and made many visitations to supervise them. She traveled by train, stagecoach, boat and car from one end of the country to the other in a flurry of apostolic activity. In most cases in the early days of her missions, Mother herself went to help the mission get set up and welcomed the sisters when they arrived. She had to deal with architects, contractors, lawyers and local church authorities. She had to be familiar with all of the details of the mission and plan its implementation. She also helped to clean and furnish the buildings. It took all of her talents in cooperation with God’s graces to do what seemed the impossible.
Mother believed that the best help for African-Americans and Indians was a Christian education that taught the whole person, mind and spirit. She could not change a racist society but she did what she could do within its limitations. She taught the victims of discrimination that they were children of God, equal in dignity to all. That education entered into their homes and later into society.
Discrimination, racism, and segregation through so-called “separate but equal” public facilities remained as the law of the land of the United States until the Supreme Court reversed itself in 1954 in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. 