St. Katharine Drexel

Who they were

Katharine Drexel was Philadelphia banking royalty, the family firm a partner to J.P. Morgan, raised by parents who opened their house to the poor three days a week on the principle that wealth was a trust.

Inheriting a fortune worth hundreds of millions in today's money, she asked Leo XIII in a private audience to send missionaries to the Native and Black communities whose schooling America had abandoned. The pope's reply ended her plans for a quiet life: why not become a missionary yourself? She did it totally. She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891, and over sixty years built and staffed more than sixty schools and missions across the South and West for Black and Native children, including Xavier University of Louisiana, still the nation's only historically Black Catholic university. She endured arson threats, segregation era law, with Georgia attempting to prosecute her sisters for teaching Black children, and the steady disapproval of her class. A stroke at seventy seven imposed her last vocation: twenty years of silent prayer in a room above the chapel. When she died at ninety six the fortune was gone, all of it spent.

Why people turn to St. Katharine Drexel

Anyone with resources asking the uncomfortable question of what they are for: donors, business owners, inheritors. And her racial justice patronage stands beside those of Martin de Porres and Peter Claver.

How to ask their intercession

Before the giving decision, honestly sized. Her test was never the amount but the answer to the pope's question. Ask her prayers to hear it addressed to you.