Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  23. John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism, 2nd ed. rev. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 151.

  24. Julie Byrne, “Roman Catholics and Immigration in Nineteenth-Century America,” National Humanities Council, online, n.d.

  25. Henry James, The American (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp. 867-69.

  26. A reproduction of the 1836 book is available from Kessinger Publishing of Whitefish, Montana (July 1, 2003).

  Chapter 1

  Simply Katie: Katharine Drexel’s Family Life

  The family has been called the first school for virtue; indeed, Pope John Paul II called the family the “first seminary,” “the domestic church,” and “the nursery of vocations.”1 Catholic Christian families teach their young what it means to be Catholic and how, practically, to live one’s life as a Christian. Katharine Drexel’s parents fostered in her and her sisters a love of virtue carried out for the benefit of others less fortunate. This chapter will demonstrate that what she learned from her parents, who through word, deed, and example set in motion the development of personal sanctity and benevolent actions that ultimately made Katharine Drexel a saint.

  Katharine Drexel was not born a saint. She worked toward sanctity her entire life and, in her own estimation, fell miserably short of her goal. Her sainthood was the result of a lifelong pursuit of the perfection commanded by Jesus of his disciples. She came into this world with many of its blessings — a large, loving family and great material wealth. She was a debutante and an heiress, but these are not what one thinks about when contemplating the essence of a saint. In fact, wealth is more often than not a stumbling block to sanctity. After the encounter with the rich young man who had kept all the commandments but could not give up all his possessions to follow Jesus, Jesus remarked to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23).

  Yet Katharine Drexel is recognized by the Catholic Church as a saint in that very kingdom. She became a saint not because of her wealth, but because of the spirit of poverty and stewardship with which she grew in perfection, judiciously dispensing her wealth for the specific spiritual and educational benefit of Native Americans and African Americans, the least of Jesus’ brothers in America. She lived into her ninety-seventh year. For the last sixty-seven of them, she was known as Mother Mary Katharine Drexel, founder of the congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, but until she was thirty she was simply Katie Drexel. The love and charity she would later channel through her religious order were extensions and amplifications of the lessons she learned from her family.

  This chapter will consider Katharine’s early life within the circle of her family until that circle was broken, indeed shattered, by the death, first, of her mother and, then, of her father. It will reveal a close family that thoroughly enjoyed its wealth and social position, but will also reveal a family life tempered by the spirituality of its wife and mother, who wrote to her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, then aged eleven: “Chère Petite, Read the beautiful device above [Aidez vous et Dieu vous aidera (Help yourself and God will help you)] and resolve to try for yourself that you may have the grace of God in all your undertakings, particularly in your studies, that one day by the cultivation of your mind and the elegance of your deportment . . . you may become my jewel, my crown, my glory.”2 It became the goal of each of her three daughters to become, by the grace of God, their mother’s jewel, crown, and glory.

  Family Background

  Katharine Drexel was born on November 26, 1858, the second daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth Drexel, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.3 Her father was a well-known businessman whose banking empire maintained firms in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris. He had entered the banking business at the age of thirteen as a clerk and night watchman for his father’s Drexel & Company. His father, Francis Martin Drexel, was a native of Dornbirn, Austria, born on an Easter Sunday, who left his homeland twice to escape military conscription and again later in search of commissions as a painter of portraits. Francis Martin Drexel was educated in Austria and then sent to Italy to learn painting before being apprenticed to an Austrian painter. Like many young men of his generation, he decided to try the opportunities available in the United States. He was willing to give America a six-month trial, but he did not intend to stay indefinitely. He left Amsterdam on May 16, 1817, aboard John of Baltimore and arrived in Philadelphia on July 28. In short order, Francis Martin opened a studio at 131 South Front Street and became employed as an art instructor at Bazeley’s Female Seminary. He was immediately popular as a portrait painter and teacher. He painted three portraits in the first month he was in Philadelphia. The following year he exhibited nine oil paintings and three drawings at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. The annual exhibition of the Academy showed his work for six consecutive years.

  In 1821 he married Catherine Hookey of Philadelphia, giving up on his vow to return to Austria and not make the United States his permanent home. His work as a painter and art teacher continued to prosper until he became the victim of libel and slander by Bernard Gallagher, Catherine’s brother-in-law.4 Francis Martin sued Gallagher, and even though Gallagher admitted his falsehoods and the case was settled out of court, the taint of a lawsuit caused the drop-off of Drexel’s commissions among his high-class clientele and the loss of his art students. He was released from Bazeley’s Seminary. Without other employment prospects, he was forced to leave his wife and two sons in Philadelphia to make two long trips to South America and Mexico in search of commissions.

  He painted copies of portraits of Simon Bolívar and other liberators and undertook personal commissions from the socially elite. Between 1826 and 1837, Francis Martin was gone from Philadelphia for a total of six years. He earned approximately $22,000 in commissions during his South American sojourn. He sent $14,000 home to Catherine and the children; of the rest he was either robbed or refused payment, or he spent it on expenses, paints, and travel. While on his travels, he learned from the men and women with whom he had contact about the world of finance and currency. He returned to the United States on the eve of the 1837 financial panic precipitated by the end of the charter for the Bank of the United States and by President Andrew Jackson’s manipulations and decision to accept only gold or silver species for federal land transactions. Seizing what he saw as an opportunity, Francis Martin opened a small currency brokerage firm in Louisville, Kentucky, doing business in state currencies and in gold. He did well but decided that because Nicholas Biddle’s Second Bank of the United States (1816-1836) was in Philadelphia, that city was a more likely banking capital than Louisville. Accordingly, he moved his operations to Philadelphia and took his sons Francis Anthony and Anthony, then thirteen and eleven, into the business of Drexel & Company. Ten years later, Drexel & Company was in a position to lend money to the federal government for the war against Mexico. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, Francis Martin was off to San Francisco to establish the firm there, leaving his young sons in charge in Philadelphia. The boys proved to be talented and hardworking bankers who complemented one another’s style and inclination and increased the family fortunes. Drexel & Company raised large sums of money for the federal government during the Civil War (1861-1865). So important were the Drexel brothers to President Ulysses Grant, that Grant offered Katharine’s uncle Anthony Drexel a position in his cabinet as secretary of the treasury. He declined the honor, though he and the president remained friends for life. The Drexel brothers, according to historian Dan Rottenberg, maintained a straitlaced life out of the public eye, “unsullied by financial or sexual scandal, unlike, say, the lives of . . . more colorful Wall Street contemporaries Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.”5

  On September 28, 1854, Francis Anthony Drexel married Hannah Jane Langstroth at the Assumption Church. The Langstroth family belonged to a
sect of German Baptist pietists called Dunkards because of their practice of adult baptism, which prescribed total immersion three times during the sacrament, once for each person of the Trinity. The Dunkards stressed high moral standards, plain living, and what we would today call social justice as the road to heaven.6 Even as the wife of one of Philadelphia’s richest men, Hannah Langstroth Drexel followed the plain-living Dunkard precepts of her girlhood. When she died, all her personal property was put into a small box, locked away in a vault at Drexel & Company, and forgotten for several decades. When the box was opened, it contained only a brooch, a jeweled barrette, a few ornamented hair combs, a gold thimble, a gold lorgnette, and a few calling cards. Hannah was the mother Katharine was never to know because she died five weeks after Katharine’s birth. However, Hannah’s mother, Elizabeth Lehman Langstroth, was a loving and influential grandmother to Katharine and her older sister, Elizabeth.

  Francis Anthony Drexel met the death of his young wife with Christian stoicism. After her passing he wrote, “If I know myself I am resigned to this dispensation of the Almighty. His will in all things be done, for he ordereth all things wisely and well. He has not left me comfortless for I have been received into the Mother Church wherein is my consolation. I have every assurance that my beloved one has gone to her heavenly father.”7 Although he was born a Catholic, Drexel may have lapsed somewhat during his marriage to the Protestant Hannah, only to be received again into the Church, “wherein is my consolation,” after her death.8 Nearly two years later, he married again. His second wife was the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia Catholic family of French origin. Emma Mary Bouvier turned out to be a fortuitous choice for Francis Anthony and his two small daughters, Elizabeth and Katharine. She was a devoted wife and stepmother who did not differentiate among her children, and, though she encouraged her daughters to enjoy a social life, she personally preferred the simplicity of family life to that of society. This is a fact that takes on greater meaning over the next twenty years as the girls matured into young adults. Two successive New Year letters from Francis Anthony to Emma give a glimpse into their personal lives.

  My dear and affectionate wife:

  It is well at the beginning of another year to give expression to the thoughts that have been active in the mind during the one just gone by, as well as to form resolutions which may govern us in the one to come.

  Many various blessings have been conferred upon us the time we have been united — a special Providence it has been that brought us together, and if we operate according to its designs it will be the means of amending much in us that needs correction.

  A similarity in feeling and disposition unless regulated by mutual love and forbearance, does not in general produce perfect accord — what each of us offends in we are less liable to forgive in the other — mutual forbearance is necessary for both of us and for my part I feel that you have shown it toward me in a greater degree than I have returned it. Had I performed my religious duties with more seriousness and attention I should probably not now stand self-convicted.

  We have received many and various blessings. Let us not be forgetful of them but in the time to come may we show by our punctuality in approaching the Blessed Sacrament and the attention and devotion that we manifest in preparing for it, that we appreciate the means of salvation which have been designed to sustain our spiritual live. May our hearts be continually directed towards Him who suffered and died for us and gave us his flesh for our life — when tempted let us instantly call on our Blessed Mother — she is our friend and helps us. God has bestowed on us abundance. Continue your charities in His name. Be the dispenser of His gifts and let us also extend the charity of thought to those who offend us.

  In conclusion, my dear, dear one, let me wish you a happy New Year indeed, and strength to bear all the little trials that may befall you. May your warm, tender, loving heart beat more tenderly toward your loving and affectionate husband, pardoning him his faults and sustaining him in trials, and thus make home a heaven here below.

  Affectionately your own,

  Frank9

  Not only does this letter show the intimate connection between husband and wife, but it also demonstrates their connection to Christ, the sacraments, and the Virgin Mary; the writer also recognizes that their abundant goods are but gifts from God in their stewardship intended to be shared with others in need. Remove the references to husband and wife, and this letter could well have been written by Frank Drexel to his daughter Katie, who would in time take his very instructions to heart.

  In the following year’s letter Frank makes note of the birth of Louise and of the death of his father, Francis Martin Drexel. The elder Drexel died after falling under the wheels of a train.

  My own darling,

  Another circle has been added to those gone by, and during it God has been very bountiful to us, giving us an abundance of both spiritual and temporal blessings, not the least of which is that sweet pledge of our affections — Louise. Having followed His divine order may she, if she be preserved to us, be a means of strengthening and increasing our affection.

  The tender cares of a mother have kept us much apart and thrown additional responsibilities on you, but may we not expect increased blessings on both mother and father and also as the child increases in age, our alleviation.

  This past year has separated me from my dearly beloved father — He has gone before me and needs all our prayers for his soul — Remember him as you would me.

  I have to thank you for your kind forbearance and gentle love which you have bestowed upon me. You have overcome yourself, I have retrograded. I will try to do better and will pray to Him from whom Only help can come.

  With most tender affection,

  Your husband,

  F. A. Drexel10

  This letter again emphasizes the importance of God and things of the spirit in the Drexel family home. Exactly why Frank needed Emma’s forbearance is never made clear, but the mention of it indicates the level of introspection and self-discernment that was the norm in the Drexel household.

  When Emma gave birth to Louise, the family was rounded out to three daughters. It is clear from reading their family letters that the Francis Anthony Drexel family was particularly close and loving. In later years, the sisters would refer to themselves as “We Three” and the “All Three.” As the sister in the middle, Katharine, or Katie as she was called, was emotionally closer to both Elizabeth and Louise than they were to each other. They each were devoted to their parents. So close were they that Katharine did not know until she was thirteen that Emma was her stepmother, not her birth mother. Almost unbelievably, it did not seem to occur to young Katharine that three sets of grandparents was one set too many. Emma would always be “Dear Mama” or “Darling Mama” to Katharine. Six-year-old Katharine wrote a note to her mother on her birthday.

  Dear Mama:

  Happy Birthday. I hope you will be pleased with Grandpa’s likeness and present. May the Blessed Mother send you a kiss from Heaven.

  Your affectionate little daughter,

  Katie11

  Both Emma and the Virgin Mary would be Katharine’s role models of the perfect mother and servant to others.

  Academic and Religious Education

  Emma supervised the education of her three daughters. She sent Elizabeth to the sisters of the Sacred Heart at Eden Hall to be educated, where she herself had gone to school. Emma’s own sister, Madame Louise Bouvier, was a member of this French order and in residence as the superior at Eden Hall, near the Drexel home. Emma set aside and decorated a room in their home as a classroom and engaged tutors when it was time for Katharine and Louise to begin their formal education. Katharine fondly recalled and described her classroom as “our bright, cozy little school-room, with its bay window, convenient map rack, picture covered walls, study table piled high with interesting books and its jardinière of green ferns.”12 Emma Drexel insist
ed on a classical education for all three of her daughters. They read Cicero, Horace, and Livy in Latin; English classics by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pope; French literature, German philosophy, world geography, ancient and modern history, and church history; and they studied mathematics. Many of their well-thumbed and annotated schoolbooks are in the archives at the motherhouse in Cornwells Heights, outside of Philadelphia. The girls also studied music, played the piano, and sang as required of young ladies of their era and social standing.

  They had specific teachers for Latin, French, and music, but their mother hired Miss Mary Bernice “Bern” Cassidy to oversee all the other elements of the girls’ academic education. Miss Cassidy came to the Drexels via Madame Bouvier, who recommended her as a governess for her nieces. Miss Cassidy was a well-educated Irishwoman who had immigrated to the United States with her family. Her father died almost immediately upon their arrival, leaving Miss Cassidy in need of a position to support her mother and younger brother. She became an important and intimate member of the Drexel family until her death in 1902. Fortunately for future Drexel biographers, one of the main avenues for teaching the girls grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, and style was Miss Cassidy’s insistence on original compositions in prose, poetry, and letter writing. Miss Cassidy wrote an initial assessment of her pupils for their mother shortly after she took over as their governess. Of Katharine she noted, “And Kate will make a good steady, constantly advancing scholar — opening the valves of her mind slowly, but keeping them closed securely on what she has once admitted.”13

  Not only did Emma Drexel oversee the academic education of her daughters, she also took their religious education in hand. On Sunday evenings, the family would gather in the parlor for a religion seminar of sorts. They took turns reading and reporting on the lives of saints. As young children, the girls would make up little dramas and plays about their favorite saints. Katie took as her patron saint Catherine of Siena. She was also particularly fond of St. Francis of Assisi because of his simple piety and his poverty. But she was open to all the saints. She prayed to St. Joseph to teach her how to speak French, and she asked her mother to keep all her French correspondence so she could see how she was improving. Katharine’s mastery of French was due to her own diligence rather than to the intervention of St. Joseph, but even in something as small as this, Katharine was willing to see the fruits of her labors as the result of God or the saints working through her.