Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  Somewhat physically restored, Katharine joined her sisters in touring a half dozen or so industrial schools in France, taking time out to visit the couturiers in Paris to replenish their wardrobes with the latest styles. However, as always, a Drexel family trip was an occasion for a religious pilgrimage. Katharine, all the while, was seeking confirmation of her call to religion by prayer and fasting, so much so that Bishop O’Connor wrote to her,

  I come again to caution you against fasting. I want you to bear with my insistence in this matter. In all candor I tell you I have the highest opinion of your judgement in other matters, but in your spiritual direction of yourself, you are not to be trusted. Very few are; and we all, at times, make serious mistakes in the management of our own spiritual affairs. . . . Let me then, as your spiritual advisor, recommend, and as far as I can, command you not to fast or abstain. . . . You will have other opportunities enough of denying yourself in other ways besides food. You can mortify the will, the eyes, and the tongue in ways it is needless for me to enumerate.37

  Katharine tried to keep her fasting within bounds, but this was a topic that would have to be visited periodically. In the meantime, Katharine and her sisters toured the many pilgrimage sites in Spain, eventually making their way to Rome.

  In Rome, the sisters naturally wanted an audience with Pope Leo XIII. He undoubtedly knew in advance of the rich philanthropy of the Drexel family. The sisters had two audiences with the pope and attended one of his personal masses. In an oral interview during the Catholic Students Mission Crusade Convention held in Dayton, Ohio, August 18-21, 1921, Mother Katharine described what led up to her boldness to speak before the pope:

  When I was still in my youth, God’s Providence brought me into touch with three magnificent missionaries, Bishop Marty, Monsignor Stephan, and Bishop O’Connor. Bishop Marty and Monsignor Stephan told me of their personal experience with the [Sioux] Indians of Dakota, and with joy I gave them the means to erect a boarding school for the Indians. Bishop O’Connor tried in vain to obtain priests to open a mission for his Arapaho and Shoshone Indians in Wyoming. He could find sisters, but no order of men. What could sisters do without a priest? I was willing to give the means to put up the mission buildings, but without priests to minister to the sisters and the heathens — what use?

  At this time my then unmarried sisters and I were going on a trip to Europe. Bishop O’Connor asked me whether I would not try to find in Europe an order of priests willing to work for this Indian mission of his. I remember summoning up my courage and asking in several European monasteries, but always in vain.

  Then we went to Rome and had a private audience with Pope Leo XIII. Kneeling at his feet, my girlish fancy thought that surely God’s Vicar would not refuse me. So I pleaded missionary priests for Bishop O’Connor’s Indians. To my astonishment His Holiness responded, “Why not, my child, become yourself a missionary?” In reply I said, “Because, Holy Father, sisters can be had for the missions, but no priests.”38

  This was certainly not the answer that Katharine was expecting to her question. In her private conversation with Pope Leo, she confided that she was seriously considering a vocation to a contemplative order of sisters, but that she was also very interested in the plight of the Native Americans and that she had been helping the Indian Bureau to build and staff missions. “It has seemed to me more than once, Your Holiness, that I ought to aid [the Indians] by my personal work among them as well [as giving money], and if I enter an enclosed congregation I might be abandoning those whom God wants me to serve.”39 It is no wonder that Pope Leo suggested that she become a missionary. Her private interview with the pope ended with his blessing for her “and all [her] future works.”40 The audience left Katharine in tears, weeping in confusion and perplexity. As she tried to make sense of the pope’s words to her, she still heard regularly in Europe from Fr. Stephan and Bishop O’Connor, who were keeping her up to date on events at the Indian missions she was helping to fund. When Katharine gave money, she always wanted an accounting of how it was being used and to what results.

  She did not tell anyone about her private conversation with the pope, but she continued to insist that she was called to the religious life. Bishop O’Connor wrote her:

  You are certainly doing immense good where you are [in the world]. It were [sic] not wise to abandon the certain for the uncertain. You are making bountiful provision for the most abandoned and forlorn of God’s creatures on this continent. You have the means, you have the brains, you have the freedom to do this work well. [The work referred to here is her philanthropic endeavors in the Indian mission field.] In religion you could direct your income to this or some other good purpose, but your talents and energies would be directed by others. You would therefore not have the freedom necessary to do this work well and to interest others in it, which you have in the world. You are doing more for the Indians now, than any religious, or even community of religious has ever done, or perhaps could ever do for them in this country.41

  It is clear that Bishop O’Connor was interested in directing both her money and her personal assistance to the Native Americans.

  It seems not to have occurred to either Katharine or Bishop O’Connor that she might become the founder of a missionary order of sisters, even though he believed no order of sisters in the United States was fit or willing to undertake Indian missionary work. For his part, he simply did not believe that she had a religious vocation and felt that she could do more good being in the world. For her part, she felt called to the religious life as a contemplative sister within the cloistered walls. In the letter quoted above, the bishop suggested to the heiress that to solve the problems of finding missionary sisters for the Indian missions he would get the permission of Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia to invite the Sisters of Providence from Montreal, Canada, to establish a branch novitiate in Philadelphia. There, the French-speaking sisters with extensive experience with Native Americans could learn English before heading west. Katharine Drexel’s role would be to fund the enterprise. This was only one of many counterproposals that Bishop O’Connor would make to her over the period of her discernment. Katharine was willing to fund a novitiate for the Sisters of Providence, but the Sisters were not able to spare any of their novices to take up more missionary work than the order already had under way. As Bishop O’Connor had foretold, “Nuns are generally unwilling — and it is well that they should, as a general thing, be unwilling to leave the beaten track on which they have been accustomed to travel.”42 Even on her European recovery and fact-finding trip, her vocation was constantly on her mind, and the letters between Katharine and her spiritual adviser were plentiful. She also had repeated letters of invitation from Bishop Marty, Fr. Stephan, and Bishop O’Connor to visit their Indian missions after her return home from Europe.

  The Drexel sisters sailed for the United States on April 19, 1887, on the SS Etruria. By late September, the “All Three” were on a train headed west in the company of Bishop O’Connor. They stopped over a day in Omaha, where the Drexels bought gifts for the Indians they would meet at the missions. After another day of train travel, Fr. Stephan met them at the top of the railhead. Setting off over the roadless prairie, Kate rode in a carriage or buckboard with Fr. Stephan and Bishop O’Connor, while Elizabeth and Louise rode horseback. This was not the luxurious travel that the Drexel sisters were accustomed to — there were no hotels and no room service. They were roughing it in the true western fashion with tents, campfires, and even the occasional springless buckboard.

  The first mission the party came to was at the Rosebud Agency in South Dakota. Katharine had funded a school there and subsidized its staffing by Jesuit priests and the Sisters of Saint Francis from Stella Niagara, New York. It was named the St. Francis Mission in honor of her father, Francis Drexel. The party arrived at the mission unannounced. The eastern women were given a first-floor room with makeshift beds in the as-yet-unfinished convent. They awoke in the
morning to Indian faces against their curtainless window and the sound of giggles. Louise described some of her impressions of the day:

  Indian children at 7:00 a.m. Mass. At nine o’clock Mass congregation of Indians. Large crowd. Squaws in bright colored shawls and dresses, some with faces painted red, some yellow, some with paint down the hair part, some with papooses held to their backs with shawls. Men wrapped in unbleached sheets, some in fancy costumes, some in European clothes. All with long hair. Size of squaws. After Mass general “howing.” Ox killed for feast. Eaten raw by Indians. Distribution of gifts. . . . A collection of Tepees and log huts, ox tails, hoofs, rag strewn on village green. Picturesque sight to see Indians flocking to the Mission, some on foot, some on horseback, some in wagons. Bracelets on arms. Some of the squaws have their ears pierced in two places. Children at Mission well-cared for. Forced march to Valentine, covering a distance of 34 miles in 4½ hours. 64 miles ridden in two days.43

  The next mission the Drexels visited was the Holy Rosary Mission at the Pine Bluff Agency, so named because of Emma Bouvier Drexel’s special devotion to praying the rosary. There they met the famous Oglala Lakota Sioux warrior and chief, Red Cloud. They presented him with a gift of a handsome bridle and saddle and gave his wife a lovely fringed shawl. They paid him a special honor by visiting him in his own home, leaving behind a store of sugar. They were introduced to Red Cloud as the ones who had built and would maintain the mission school for the education of his people. Red Cloud’s friendship with the Drexel sisters and ultimately the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament turned out to be extremely important when, in the 1891-1892 Sioux uprising, he intervened with his warring braves to save the Holy Rosary Mission from a certain massacre.

  The Drexel sisters visited many missions, but, in addition to their introduction to the Sioux at the St. Francis Mission, an experience that must have impressed them was with the Crow Indians at the Immaculate Conception Mission in Stephan, South Dakota. The Immaculate Conception had been Emma Bouvier Drexel’s favorite title for the Virgin Mary. There, after a feast, the Indians put on a dance for Katharine and her sisters, “clothed for the most part in paint, with sleigh bells at their knees and feathers in their hair.”44 It must have been a thrilling but unsettling sight for the prim Miss Drexels of Philadelphia to be presented with the spectacle of mostly naked men dancing to the beat of the drums. Katharine wrote to Bishop O’Connor, who had left their party after the stay at Holy Rosary Mission: “It seems to me that these Immaculate Conception Crow Indians take a palm for intelligent faces, and noble form.” She added:

  On Rosary Sunday, I took a vow of obedience for three months to you as my Spiritual Director. I enclose a copy of the rules as I understand them. May I trouble you to correct them where they are wrong; to add to them as you think fit and then to mail them back to me.

  Candidly I must own that I am very much tempted to gluttony, more than gourmandise. I have no submission nor humility nor spirit of mortification with regard to eating. — And yet, indifference must be acquired, and my will brought into agreement with the Divine Will, if I would say with St. Paul, “I know how to abound and to be brought low, to be hungry, etc.” — Teach me, Reverend Father, the way to do always the Will of God. — Sometimes I think it would be best to eat just what others eat so as not to be singular. All this I submit to you, and also antidotes to pride and vanity.45

  She constantly came back to food as a special weakness of hers, along with pride and vanity. It would appear that her exaggeration of her gluttony might be an attempt to get her spiritual adviser to approve her desire to fast. At this point in her discernment, her pride and vanity were actual, spiritual sins. She took pride in and was vain about her religious inclinations. Additionally, she probably wanted to demonstrate to the bishop that she had the stamina for the rigors of religious life, which he maintained were too strenuous for her, both physically and mentally. In a letter to her adviser dated May 31, 1888, Katharine explicitly stated, “I wish to pass as being mortified in eating, as one who frequently even fasts!!!”

  The following, marked by her own hand as “STRICTLY PRIVATE,” may be “the rules” she referred to in the October 13, 1887, letter.

  Not to eat between meals.

  Not to eat dessert (fruit excepted).

  Not to take sugar in tea.

  Pray one hour and a half each day, viz.:

  20MinutesMass

  15"Thanksgiving

  15"Rosary

  15"Visits to the Blessed Sacrament. If I belong to the Third Order of St. Francis, then the prayers of the Order will take up a great part of the 15 minutes. Also once a week five minutes preparation for Confession will have to come out of this.

  ¼ hour visit to the Blessed Sacrament if I do not pray more than 1½ hour.

  5minutespreparation for Holy Communion.

  10"Night Prayers.

  What shall I take for Particular Examen Practice? I have been advised to take the following : — “To do everything with the view of pleasing God.” Simplicity of Intention.

  In making my preparations for Holy Communion is it not best to use a prayer-book and read some “Preparation” as I am very dry when left to prayers of my own composition, perhaps; however, they may be more acceptable to God on that account. The same question I must ask with regard to ¼ hour visit to the Blessed Sacrament, — shall I use prayer-book?

  Shall I read over from time to time your letter deciding why I should not enter a convent?

  Shall I, when I am able (even neglecting temporal affairs for same) read one quarter of hour spiritual reading say Ullathorne’s “Ground work of Christian Virtues.” Or Life of the Blessed Virgin as she is in the Gospels by Canon Nicholas, or Rodriguez’s “Xian Perfection,” or “Spiritual Combat.” Are there other books you would prefer my reading?46

  O’Connor responded that she should not read many religious books; “indeed, the fewer the better. . . . You must bear in mind that the works in which you are engaged are a constant prayer, and an exercise of sublime charity. Don’t unfit yourself to discharge them, by undermining your health or wasting much time in desultory pious reading. . . . You must think and pray enough to give your thoughts and actions the right direction, but no more. . . . You have opportunities to act for God and your neighbor, vouchsafed to few. But, as I said above, this very action is, in itself, the most meritorious sort of prayer.”47 At this point in her discernment process, he continued to express concern for her physical state, which was indeed quite fragile, and her religious cast of mind that was ascetic and contemplative. She believed that she could be happy and serve God the most by continuous prayer and mortification. He tried time and again to get her to see her philanthropic actions and personal example as the way of life most pleasing to God. It was a constant battle between them.

  What was a tremendous success on Bishop O’Connor’s part was his invitation, along with those of Bishop Marty and Fr. Stephan, to visit the Indian missions in the West. They prevailed on the Drexel sisters to make another trip west in the autumn of 1888. The sisters stood as godmothers to three Indian children who took the names Katharine, Elizabeth, and Louise for their baptismal names. Katharine came home to Philadelphia with a great enthusiasm for aiding the Native Americans by building schools, churches, and convents at Indian missions and by establishing new missions where there were none.

  [She engaged] a firm of architects to draw up plans for the construction of boarding schools which she determined to erect for the Indians whose poverty she had witnessed and whose needs she realized. Within five years, as a result of her zeal for souls and her love of God and her neighbor, her benefactions stretched in a long line of mission schools from the great Northwest to the Mexican border. They were built among the Puyallups in Washington, the Cheyennes and Arapahos in Wyoming, the Sioux in North Dakota, the Coeur d’Alene, Nez Perce in Idaho, the Mission Indians in California, the Chippewas i
n Wisconsin, the Crows and Blackfeet in Montana, the Cherokees, Comanches, and the Osages in Indian Territory and Oklahoma, and the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. Kate with her keen, orderly business instinct followed a definite procedure in all this. She paid for the land and the erection of plain, serviceable buildings. Then the grounds and the buildings were deeded to the Catholic Indian Bureau.48

  Not only did Katharine build up the missions, she also found nuns to staff them. She and her two sisters donated $30,000 to the Sisters of Saint Francis of Philadelphia to work in the missions.

  She and her sisters were not separated by their charitable works, as they feared they might be; rather they were united, even if Kate gave, in her early years, more attention to the Native Americans than to the blacks. She had learned from Fr. Stephan that the Native Americans and the African Americans were “color relations.”49 Still, Katharine was teased by Louise, “You have only some hundred thousand souls in your Indian field, but I have ten or more millions in my Negro harvest.”50

  In the meantime, Katharine was worried about Louise, who had received a proposal of marriage from a Protestant young man. Louise refused the gentleman, to the relief of her sisters, but Katharine believed it was her duty to introduce Louise to eligible Catholic suitors. However, the plan was perhaps backfiring on her. She wrote to Bishop O’Connor, “Naturally, I love to flirt. . . . When I am with men I find it difficult not to flirt.”51 Might she be caught in the snare set for her younger sister? This was not the first time her attraction to men had come up. In the late spring, he reassured her, after telling her that “[You are] . . . doing more for God, yourself, and others than you could do in religion,” that “You must not forget that dangers encompass you, you have the passions of other people, you have a woman’s heart, and a woman’s affections, you must be on your guard, if you desire to persevere in the path you have led for the last couple of years. Should you tire of it, you can take another less difficult to travel [marriage] — or one that is thought to be such — but whilst in it, look deliberately at nothing that would turn your thoughts from the object you have in view.”52 His very next letter continued the same theme. “Have we not all been warned to prepare our hearts for temptation, when we come to the service of God? . . . So don’t be at all surprised when your turn comes. . . . Don’t be surprised at coming now and then, on that soft spot you mention. No woman’s heart is without it. The only question is, whose image shall it receive? Shall it be that of a mortal, or of Him ‘at whose beauty the sun and the moon stand in wonder’?”53