Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  ***

  Some background on the social, historical, and political contexts for Katharine’s emergence is important for understanding her life’s trajectory. As early as the sixteenth century, several orders of missionary priests came to the New World to evangelize the native peoples; the Jesuits, Benedictines, and Franciscans are only the most famous. The priests were aided by the Ursuline and Franciscan women, among others. Over the course of three hundred years, the Catholic missionaries met with varied, but steady, success. Most of the Native American tribes, from the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and across the West to the Pacific Ocean, were evangelized by Catholic missionaries.

  After the Civil War (1861-1865), President Ulysses Grant believed that the settlement of the West by white settlers was inevitable. To make the territories safe for white settlers and to accommodate the Native Americans’ desires to have areas set aside for their way of life free from the presence of whites, native tribes signed treaties with the federal government providing for their removal from homelands to reservations and territories. From the confines of the reservations, bands of young Indian warriors frequently went on the “warpath” to steal horses or brides, or merely to assert their manhood. Native uprisings were ruthlessly put down by the United States cavalry, and whole tribes suffered greatly for the actions of a few. Grant believed that the best means to pacify the native tribes and to save them from extinction was to educate and Christianize them. To this end, he promulgated in 1870 what is known as Grant’s Peace Policy. He said to a joint meeting of the United States Congress: “Indian agencies being civil offices, I determined to give all the agencies to such religious denominations as had hitherto established missioners among the Indians and perhaps to some other denominations who would undertake the work on the same terms — i.e. missionary work.”14

  Agency heads, though civil servants, were to be appointed by the religious denominations. As Sr. Consuela Duffy, SBS, points out, at the date of the proclamation “there were seventy-two Indian agencies; in thirty-eight of these, Catholic missionaries were the first to establish themselves.” However, only eight agencies were assigned to the Catholic Church. The Protestant churches in the United States were so much better organized politically than the Catholic Church that the U.S. Board of Indian Commissioners was made up exclusively of Protestant men. As a result, “some eighty thousand Catholic baptized Indians were put under Protestant Control.”15 Amazingly, railroad tracks served as boundaries by which tribes were assigned to denominations.

  Naturally, this parceling out of the Indian tribes met with a great deal of protest from Catholic leaders, as well as from various Indian tribes. After over two years of trying to deal with the government’s intransigence, the United States Catholic bishops in 1874 created the Catholic Commission for Indian Affairs. In 1879 the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions was formed to replace the commission. Its purpose was to secure, if possible, the remainder of those agencies to which Catholic missionaries were justly entitled under the terms of Grant’s Peace Policy and to direct the agencies assigned to Catholic missionaries, as well as to establish and staff schools for the Indians.16

  Although the government assigned various tribes to various denominations, it was up to the denominations to support the missions financially. The burden on them to fund their missions and their missionaries was tremendous. And for the Catholic Church, this was at a time of immense foreign-born Catholic immigration into the cities of the Atlantic seaboard. Most eastern dioceses were completely overwhelmed just seeing to the spiritual and material needs of the throngs of Italian, Irish, Polish, and German Catholics who were daily joining them. Mostly due to immigration, the Roman Catholic population of the United States quadrupled from 1860 to 1895.17 Church societies had great difficulty turning their attention to the desperate needs of Native Americans, or for that matter, African Americans, most of whose ancestors had been forced to come to the continent as slaves. Much of their blindness to the plight of these groups was due to the rampant racism of the nineteenth century. The new European immigrants were copies of themselves, but Native Americans and African Americans were “different” and not high on the list of charitable priorities. This attitude, however, held no sway in the Drexel household. The Drexel family was dedicated to serving the needs of those who could claim to be among the least of Jesus’ brothers.

  Shortly after the death of their father in 1885, the three Drexel sisters were gathered on the second floor of the Walnut Street, Philadelphia, family home when two visitors requested an interview. For some reason, it fell to Katharine to go down to receive them in the drawing room. Her visitors were Fr. Joseph Stephan, director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, and Bishop Martin Marty, the vicar apostolic of northern Minnesota. They explained to Katharine the new contract system whereby the federal government would pay some support for native students to attend missionary schools, provided that the schools were built, provided for, and staffed by churches. This contract system was the successor to Grant’s Peace Policy, which had failed largely because many of the denominations assigned to mission territories were either unequipped to deal with such a large and expensive undertaking or chose not to accept the challenge. On the other hand, the Catholic Church had a long history of missionary activity in the New World, and some Catholics were keen to extend the Church among the native peoples. However, they lacked the money and people to serve the missions. Fr. Stephan and Bishop Marty came to the right place when they showed up in the Drexel drawing room.

  They left there with a $500 check written by Katharine to fund a new boarding school for the Sioux Indians on the Rosebud Reservation. She followed that up with much more financial support for the Rosebud mission, personally engaging and financially supporting the Sisters of St. Francis of Stella Niagara to staff the school. She built a school for the Osages in Indian Territory, which was destroyed by a tornado shortly afterward. She immediately rebuilt it with a stronger design and sturdier materials. Eventually, her own Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament would staff both missions. Later in 1885, Fr. Stephan wrote to her to thank her for her financial support: “You and your sisters are the only ones who take a lively interest in the Catholic Indian question. True friends of the Indian are hard to find, says Bishop Marty, and we thank you with the blessings from Heaven. May the Lord be your reward.”18

  Despite General Philip Sheridan’s famous 1869 dictum that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, the romantic sentiment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage still influenced the attitude of many Americans toward Native Americans.19 This attitude could prevail because most European Americans never came in contact with the native population. This was not true for African Americans, who mixed freely in commerce, if not socially and politically, with European Americans. In several southern states the African American ex-slave population outnumbered Americans of European descent.

  The white citizens of the southern states of the former Confederacy felt they were humiliated in their defeat by the Union army during the Civil War and the subsequent presidential Reconstruction of the southern states from 1865 to 1877. Reconstruction swept white politicians out of office in the South and filled the state legislatures with former slaves.

  In reaction to Reconstruction and in support of white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. It employed tactics of intimidation, whipping, and lynching in its attempts to control the behavior and deny the voting of the newly enfranchised former slave men. Southern whites also passed a number of state bills, called “Jim Crow laws,” that imposed literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements for voting, and other measures that controlled the behavior of African American citizens. The 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson legalized “separate but equal” treatment of and facilities for African American citizens.20 Racial segregation was legal until the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Tope
ka, which stated, “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”21

  A second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1917 not only infected the southern states but also succeeded as far west as California and as far north as Pennsylvania. It turned its wrath and violence against Jews, Catholics, and especially African Americans and those who sympathized with them. The Klan once burned a cross on the grounds of the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, to protest the mission of Katharine Drexel and her sisters to aid Native Americans and African Americans. It was not the only threat by the Klan to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

  When the sisters marched in the civil rights demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s, they were spat upon and called “nigger sisters.” When the members of the group complained to their founder, she urged them to pray for their tormentors. The Klan was not the only oppressive organization opposed to African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners (meaning Chinese, Polish, and other eastern Europeans), but it was the worst. As a symbol, the Klan stood for the same feelings shared by many Americans of western European ancestry.

  When Katharine Drexel undertook to form an order of sisters to attend to the needs of Native Americans and African Americans, she was willingly taking on an almost insurmountable task. The majority of the population was mainly apathetic or even hostile to the plight of these peoples.

  To add to her burden, she was female and Catholic. Nineteenth-century women were considered under the protection of their fathers or husbands. Women could not vote in federal elections until 1920. In many states, married women had no right to their own property or wages; they could not enter into contracts on their own. They had no control over their bodies or even their children. Children belonged to their fathers. To be a woman was to be second-class. Women were marginalized from public life and subjugated in the home. While working-class women could flout social conventions and many laws, the lives of middle- and upper-class women were severely circumscribed by customs and laws. Katharine Drexel’s velvet-lined circle was very tight.

  Adding to her marginalization was her Catholicism. Protestants distrusted the Catholic minority in the United States. They believed that to be Catholic was not to be truly American, and feared that Catholics gave their political allegiance to the pope in Rome, not to the president in Washington. As recently as 1844, a mere fourteen years before Katharine’s birth, there had been anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia, her hometown, during which several churches, schools, and homes were burned; twenty had been killed and hundreds left homeless. In 1856, the anti-Catholic Committee of Vigilance took over the city government of San Francisco and “proceeded to execute four people and sought to banish from the city close to one hundred more.”22 In the presidential campaign of 1884, the slogan “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” was used by the Republicans as a rallying cry against the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland. This period of vehement anti-Catholicism not surprisingly coincided with the period of Catholicism’s greatest growth, largely due to increased immigration. The period from 1850 to 1906 saw Catholics in the United States grow from 5 percent to 17 percent of the population. By 1906, the fourteen million Catholics in the United States constituted the single largest Christian denomination. Yet despite their numbers, Catholics remained marginalized socially and economically. “No Irish need apply” was a sign my father recalled seeing in Pennsylvania storefronts. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once commented, “I regard the prejudice against your [Catholic] Church as the deepest bias in the history of the American people.”23 Such prejudice became law with the enactment of quota systems that all but halted immigration from Catholic countries by 1924.24

  Becoming a nun added further to the marginalization of Katharine Drexel. If Protestants thought that to be Catholic was to be un-American, they believed that for a woman to become a nun was positively unnatural. Even the inimitable Henry James, writing in his novel The American about Madame de Cintre’s escape into a Carmelite convent, described the convent alternately as a tomb or a prison.25 Nineteenth-century American literature of a more popular sort was replete with lurid, indeed pornographic, tales of women forced into convents, especially convents with tunnels connecting them to priests’ rectories or monasteries, convenient for burying within the walls the babies born of lustful unions. The most famous of these anti-Catholic diatribes was The Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, by the eponymous, and apocryphal, Miss Monk.26 Works such as this helped to fuel the anti-immigration, anti-Catholic,

  antinun, nativist political party, the Know Nothing, or American, Party, which was formed as a national political party in the 1850s. While the party dissolved after the 1856 election, its sentiments persisted to some degree until the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as the country’s first Catholic president, when it was widely and preposterously rumored that the pope was preparing to resettle from Rome to the Mississippi Valley.

  To be a woman, a Catholic, and a nun in nineteenth-century America was to be thrice marginalized. However, Katharine Drexel was more than prepared for what might be termed her white martyrdom. Her preparation for life, and death, began, as it does for all of us, at home in the embrace of family; that beginning is the subject of the first chapter.

  C.C.D.H.

  Tulsa, Oklahoma

  March 3, 2013

  The Feast Day of St. Katharine Drexel

  1. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton was the first native-born American saint. The founder of the American Sisters of Charity was canonized in 1975. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, an Algonquin-Mohawk Native American, was canonized in 2012.

  2. There was at the time another order called the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, so to distinguish her order and avoid confusion she added “for Indians and Colored People,” since they constituted her specific mission. The mission of the order has not changed, but its title has been shortened in common usage to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. It is abbreviated in this book as SBS.

  3. Primarily established for Catholic African American men and women, Xavier has never had a policy of racial segregation or a policy of religious exclusivity.

  4. Orson Welles, quoted in Hollywood Voices: Interviews with Film Directors, comp. Andrew Sarris (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971).

  5. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” online.

  6. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 108.

  7. Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 239 note.

  8. Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Canonizationis Servae Dei Catherinae Drexel, Fundatricis Congregationis Sororum A SS. Sacramento Pro Indis et Colrata Gente, (1858-1955): Positio super virtutibus, 3 vols. (Rome, 1986). Vol. 1 written by Rev. Joseph Martino. Hereafter this work will be referenced as Positio.

  9. Positio, 2:ii.

  10. Positio, 2:iv.

  11. Positio, 2:v.

  12. Positio, 2:vii.

  13. Positio, 2:24.

  14. William H. Ketchum, “Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions,” in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912), p. 745.

  15. Sr. Consuela Duffy, SBS, Katharine Drexel: A Biography (Philadelphia: Reilly Co., 1966), p. 81.

  16. ASBS, vol. 1, p. 52.

  17. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 827.

  18. Quoted in Katherine Burton, The Golden Door: The Life of Katharine Drexel (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1957), p. 75.

  19. In January 1869, General Sheridan held a conference with fifty Indian chiefs
at Fort Cobb in Indian Territory (later part of Oklahoma). Comanche chief Toch-a-way introduced himself to the general by saying, “Me Toch-a-way, me good Indian.” To which Sheridan is reported to have replied, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” The story may be apocryphal, but the saying eventually became widely repeated as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Dee Brown reports this and similar stories in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1990; 1st ed. 1970), pp. 147-74.

  20. Plessy v. Ferguson, Judgement, Decided May 18, 1886, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States. Record Group 267, 163, #15248, National Archives, Washington, D.C.. The phrase “separate but equal” does not actually appear in the decision.

  21. Brown v. The Board of Education, Judgment, Decided May 17, 1954, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States.

  22. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), p. 202.