Feast Day: March 3rd
Last week we accompanied Katherine Drexel up to the point when in a dramatic conversation with Pope Leo XIII, she found her desire to help the poor in America utterly redirected from philanthropic proposals, to a radical giving up of her fortune and dedicating her own life to loving them.
She conversed with a long-time family friend, Fr. James O’Connor (by this time Bp. O’Connor, a wonderful priest, now given the spectacular title “Vicar Apostolic of Nebraska”), thinking perhaps to become a contemplative nun, uncertain with this idea of becoming a missionary. “I know the privations, the trials, the temptations, and I ask myself, could I go through all these things in a manner suitable for edifying the religious of my order?” His response was unequivocal, “I was never so sure of any vocation, not even my own, as I am of yours. If you do not establish the order in question, you will allow to pass an opportunity of doing immense service to the Church which may not occur again. … Even as a foundress, you will have your faults, but God not you will do the work. He often makes use of very weak instruments. The question is not will you be all you should be, but does God will you to be his instrument.…”
Bp. O’Connor, perhaps unbeknownst to Catherine, had actually traveled to Chicago to speak about the matter with another leading churchman of the day, Archbishop John Ireland (he, fittingly, had been born in the Emerald Isle, making the arduous journey to America with his 8 siblings and mother after the Irish potato famine. From there he would become a priest in the Midwest, chaplain during the Civil war, and by the time of this conversation, a leading and patriotic Archbishop in Minneapolis). Ireland’s thoughts were just as emphatic: “Miss Drexel is just the person to do it, and if she does not undertake it, it will remain undone.” Miss Drexel, meanwhile, decided to go on a retreat, and on March 19, 1889, finally received the grace of docility to the Lord’s plans. She wrote Bp. O’Connor with joy and peace “that I could promise Our Lord to please Him by entering fully into your plan of founding an order. As long as I look on self, I cannot. Our Lord gives and will give me the grace always to look at Him.” For the rest of her life, she would always recount that “The feast of St. Joseph brought me the grace to give the remainder of my life to the Indians and the Colored.”
And so, in 1889, one of the richest women in the world, gave it all away to become a nun. She first begun her postulancy with the Sisters of Mercy in 1889, then made her first vows on February 12, 1891, thereby establishing under her leadership the religious congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored.
I, Katherine Drexel, called in religion Sister Mary Katharine . . . do vow and promise to God . . . Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, and to be the Mother and Servant of the Indian and Negro Races . . . nor shall I undertake any work which may lead to the neglect and abandonment of the Indian and Colored Races.
She would lead that congregation for decades, only slowing down when a massive heart attack in the 1930s left her bedridden for the final twenty years of her life. She would devote immense funds and energy to educate, clothe, feed, and fight for the innate dignity of all oppressed throughout the United States. She traveled all over the country, establishing schools and homes for minorities and oppressed of all sorts, suffering not just the troubles of traveling and accepting the same poverty of those she loved, but also threats and violence from incredible vitriol that her charity stirred up. A bombing was threatened as she opened one convent, St. Elizabeth’s House, thankfully not carried out as she undoubtedly laid the cornerstone. Various of her schools and other buildings were burned down from the backlash her work received. The Ku Klux Klan nailed this notice to one of her schools in Texas: “We give you one week to suppress [services at the parish] or a flogging and tar and feathering will follow.” The week slowly passed, her sisters and their school children living under that horrible threat, but Sr. Katherine did not flinch, and before the week concluded a tornado ripped through the area, demolishing two of the Klan’s strongholds outside of the town. The school remained open.
Mother Katherine faced down ridicule from all sides, and stood against bigotry of every kind, but hers was never a staunch or stoic sanctity. Joy radiated from her, especially amidst the hardships of her call. Even during the last two decades of her life, bedridden, an utterly different cross from the ones she had carried for so many years, but it allowed her to spend her last years with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, simply praying for her sisters and the poor they sought to love and protect.
– Fr. Dominic finds in some of St. Katherine’s words, a timely word of encouragement: “If we wish to serve God and love our neighbor well, we must manifest our joy in the service we render to Him and them. Let us open wide our hearts. It is joy which invites us. Press forward and fear nothing.”