Saint Katharine Drexel
When Katharine was a baby her mother passed away. Her father remarried and she was raised in his wealth as an international banker. The girls’ parents were also devout Catholics who prayed daily before a small altar in their home and performed charitable works. Several times a week, the Drexel home was opened to the community for the distribution of food, clothing, and rent money to the poor. As Katharine grew she created a spiritual plan for her life. Later, Catherine’s father took his girls to the Western United States where they saw firsthand the poverty of the Native American community on reservations. In 1885 their father died, leaving his fortune to his three girls. Over the next two years, Catherine visited and made substantial donations to Indian reservations. During an 1887 visit to Rome, she had a private audience with Pope Leo XIII and begged him to send an order of missionaries to the Native Americans. The pope lovingly said to her, “But why not be a missionary yourself, my child?” In 1889, Catherine entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh, taking the name Sister Katharine Marie. She made her final vows in 1891 and, with thirteen companions, founded the Blessed Sacrament Sisters for Indians and Colored People, becoming the order’s superior general. Mother Katharine quickly went to work, using her inheritance to found a boarding school for Pueblo Indians in New Mexico and a school for Black girls in Virginia. Over the next sixty-four years, Mother Katharine and her sisters established forty-nine elementary schools, twelve high schools, Xavier University in New Orleans for Black students, and fifty-one convents. She lived her last years in prayer, poverty, simplicity, and charity, giving all she had and all she was to the poor. She was canonized in the year 2000, the second person born in the United States to be canonized.