Katie Drexel possessed all the ingredients for a life of Gilded Age leisure: youth, beauty, a ritzy address on Rittenhouse Square, a Bucks County estate and an income of $1,000 a day.
The petite Drexel, whose grandfather founded the brokerage house of Drexel & Co., could have snagged a local princeling like her two sisters and punctuated her privileged life with assorted good works and munificent donations — the Drexels were a philanthropic tribe.
Instead, she chose the life of a poor little rich girl: She took her fortune and spent it on a life of service as a Catholic nun, vowing to be “the mother and servant” to blacks and Native Americans — the nation’s most oppressed minorities.
Product of a culture that preached — but notably failed to practice — equality of opportunity, Drexel stepped away, and in 1891 founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to carry out her pioneering mission of social justice.
By the time of her death in 1955 at the age of 96, Mother Katharine had established 145 Catholic missions, 12 schools for Native Americans, 50 schools for blacks and the nation’s first and only Catholic college for blacks (Xavier University in New Orleans). Sisters of her order served throughout the South and the urban North, including Chicago (the St. Anselm and St. Elizabeth schools), Gary (St. Monica), St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, New York and Philadelphia.
Carving out a special vocation for herself was no easy task. At first, church officials were dubious and tested the depth of her commitment. From time to time, she also harbored doubts about her work. After a debilitating heart attack in the late 1930s, she is said to have told her doctor, “Nobody is necessary for God’s work, as God could do the work without any of his creatures.” In response he delivered this gentle putdown: “Certainly, Mother, I agree with you, but he rarely does.”
Even after the Blessed Sacrament sisters survived the early trials of their far-flung undertaking, Drexel’s wealth and her family’s philanthropy provided no shield from racism. In 1915, when the sisters opened a school in Athens, Ga., a bill was introduced in the state legislature that would have prohibited “the teaching by any white teacher in any school for colored people in this state, or the teaching by any colored teacher in any school for white pupils in the state.”
Another incident occurred in 1922 when the Ku Klux Klan threatened violence at a Beaumont, Texas, mission and school built by Drexel unless services ceased. The crisis passed, thanks to a violent storm that destroyed Klan meeting places and lightning that hit a Klan leader, who died two days later.
Today, Drexel is on the fast track to sainthood, a lengthy process that can take generations and centuries. The Venerable Bede, for example, the 7th Century English theologian and historian, was not canonized or officially proclaimed a saint until 1899.
Drexel’s case for sainthood was formally introduced in 1964; in 1987, Pope John Paul II declared her “venerable” — the first step in the canonization process — on the basis of her extraordinary life of faith and works.
After that, it has been a matter of miracles. Only two miracles are needed in the process, but they must be worthy of credibility and scientifically shown to be contrary to the natural order. Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, the archbishop of Philadelphia, has said that in Drexel’s case many more miracles have occurred than have been chosen for inclusion in the sainthood process.
At a mass March 3 celebrating Drexel’s feast day and legacy, held at the city’s vast Roman-style cathedral, two families in the standing-room-only congregation gave special thanks for the miracles that had transformed their otherwise routine suburban lives.
The ceremony, which featured gospel-style singing accompanied by piano and drum, also offered a visual feast of processional banners, white vestments, plaid school uniforms, and the orange and blue plumed hats of the caped Knights of Columbus and Knights of St. Peter Claver.
After the mass, Robert Gutherman recalled a 1974 bout with a serious ear infection that had destroyed two bones in his ear and caused him agonizing pain. At the time — he was then 14 years old — the doctor had told his parents that he would no longer be able to hear in his right ear.
According to Gutherman, a Sister of the Blessed Sacrament gave his family a prayer card for Mother Katharine, which they would recite together. “We would pray hard … in a conversational way,” he said, “and we always finished with an Our Father to emphasize God’s will.”
Later, while undergoing treatment, Gutherman recounted how he awoke from an anesthetic and realized he could hear: “The doctor did not believe me at first. He finally gave me a hearing test, and it came back that I had perfect hearing in both ears.”
Before a miracle can pass muster as an authentic manifestation of God, it must be subjected to strict scrutiny by special panels of theologians and medical experts. In 1988, Gutherman’s miracle was formally attributed to Drexel’s intercession, and she was beatified, the second step to sainthood.
How did the miracle change his life? Gutherman thought for a moment before responding: “I live my life very normally. … I get up in the morning and go to work and have a family I take care of. But on the other hand, it gave me a realization of God and Jesus in ordinary lives. Most people think of Jesus as somebody who has passed on this earth many years ago, and we don’t think of him as alive for the most part. This [miracle] brings my faith alive.”
Gutherman’s cure inspired the suburban family of Constance and John Wall to seek Drexel’s intercession through their prayers after daughter Amy was born in 1992 with severely limited hearing. Tests showed the child had congenital nerve damage, which is usually considered permanent.
Constance Wall recalled one morning in 1994 when Amy — then a preschooler — had refused for the first time to use her hearing aid while watching TV. Before she could talk to Amy’s teacher about the incident, the teacher informed her that she thought Amy was now hearing.
Amy’s case became the genesis for the second miracle. Last October, a Vatican team of medical experts concluded that there was no medical explanation for her cure. And early this year, the Vatican approved that second and final miracle required for canonization.
During the lengthy sainthood process, churches have already been named in Katharine Drexel’s honor, including one in nearby Chester, Pa. Images of Blessed Katharine — her title since the 1988 beatification — have meanwhile appeared in countless church murals and decorations.
On Oct. 1, the pope will canonize Drexel a saint before throngs of pilgrims in a ceremony at St. Peter’s Square in Rome, only the second American native to be so honored. The first American, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the widowed founder of the Sisters of Charity, died in 1821 but was not canonized until 1975.
The two other American saints were European-born: St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), a native of Lombardy whose religious order worked with the poor, especially Italian immigrants, in Chicago and worldwide; and St. John Neumann (1811-1860), an immigrant from Bohemia and early Philadelphia bishop.
For the Guthermans, the Walls and many other pilgrims, Drexel’s convent in suburban Bensalem, Pa., has become a popular stop. Located northeast of the city near the Delaware River, the convent complex — with its stone walls, turrets, courtyard and red-tile roofs — exudes an old-world atmosphere.
Drexel is buried in a simple, unadorned crypt beneath the convent’s oak-beamed St. Elizabeth Chapel. Surrounding the tomb are displays of colorful objects that reflect the people served by the sisters’ far-flung mission and their traditions. Among them are a Navajo rug, a Kachina doll, black-on-black Pueblo pottery by the celebrated Maria Martinez (1887-1980), a kente cloth wall hanging, carved ivory and ebony objects from Kenya, and a tasseled cloth belt from Sierra Leone.
The source of the Drexels’ wealth was the famous brokerage house of Drexel & Co. Katharine’s Austrian-born grandfather, Francis Martin Drexel, founded the firm in 1838, having learned about banking and currency as a painter and international traveler in the early 19th Century. One of his paintings, with a biblical theme probably copied from a European original, hangs in a parlor of the convent.
During a tour of the complex, Sister Ruth Catherine Spain, director of the Blessed Katharine Drexel Guild, pointed out various memorabilia connected to Drexel: Victorian dolls, a child’s walnut desk, her checkbook and the inkwell used when writing her spiritual reflections. Physically, she was a tiny person — a makeshift wheelchair used after she suffered her first heart attack in 1935 looks as if it were intended for a small child.
At lunch, the nonagenarian Sister Margaret Kingston reminisced about Chicago, where the sisters still run St. Elizabeth’s school at 4117 S. Michigan Ave. In those days the sisters taught classes, sometimes with as many as 80, 90 and 100 students in a single classroom, and made home visits after school.
In 1935 Drexel — Kingston speaks of her as “Reverend Mother” — visited the St. Anselm school, at 6042 S. Indiana Ave., en route to the missions in the Southwest.
“I was then a brand-new teacher assigned to the 7th grade at St. Anselm’s when she came into my classroom,” Kingston recalled. “The children knew who she was and were on their best behavior. But there was a little girl who was a little slow, and I probably had ignored her as it was my first class.”
Afterwards, Drexel took her aside and pointed out the child. “She always had her eye out for someone who needed help and attention,” Kingston said.
