Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  My second reason for not wishing to found an Order for Indians and Colored is that I appreciate that a founder of an order should be animated with every virtue capable of fitting her to carry out the object of her order. If she has not the right spirit, who should have it? I know of the self-sacrifice necessary in the missionary life! I know the privations, the trials, the temptations, and I could go through all these in a manner suitable for edifying the religious in my order?

  3rdly. Is not an old and tried order more efficient in this Indian and Colored harvest? . . .

  4th. Could the Indian and Colored work not be better done by employing all the orders? The orders to be employed by the . . . Bureau [to which] I would leave all my income. . . .

  Rt. Rev’d and dear Father, I hope Our Lord will teach me to do His will. I see Him thirsty at the Well and tired. I wish to slake His thirst, according to His Will and in the manner He wills. I wish to be a docile instrument, etc., if it be His Will for me to found an Order I shall do it. I know Our Lord wished for souls, — but does He wish me to ask Him for them in prayer and contemplation, or does He wish me to found an order. The responsibility of such a call almost crushes me, because I am so infinitely poor in the virtues necessary.70

  Bishop O’Connor brushed aside her concerns as “simply scruples.”

  I was never so quietly sure of any vocation, not even my own, as I am about yours. If you do not establish the order in question, you will allow to pass an opportunity of doing immense service to the Church, which may not occur again. . . . I regard it as settled that you are to establish a new order, and I shall go to Philadelphia merely to arrange details. The Church has spoken to you through me, her unworthy organ, and you must hear her or take the consequences. Do you wish for a decree of a general council in this matter, or for a decision ex cathedra of the Pope?71

  The bishop here took a stronger stand than ever before with Katharine. He was more emphatic about her founding an order than he ever was about her not having a vocation. Moving from not believing that she had a vocation at all to deciding that she must found a new order or take the consequences was a tremendous turnaround by the bishop. It must have taken Katharine by surprise, yet she yielded to the idea of becoming a founder almost meekly and remarkably quickly. In a letter dated March 19, she wrote to Bishop O’Connor: “The Feast of St. Joseph brought me the grace to give the remainder of my life to the Indians and Colored, — to enter fully into your views [to found a new order] and those of Rev’d Stephan as to what is best for the salvation of the souls of these people. . . . As long as I look on myself, I cannot. Our Lord gives and will give me the grace always to look at Him.” Perhaps her immediate acceptance was because she had indeed had a personal ex cathedra decision from Pope Leo XIII when he had told her in 1887, “Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?” At the time, she did not know what the pope meant. With the fullness of time, making haste slowly and prayerfully, and with the intercession of her spiritual adviser, Bishop O’Connor, the pope’s meaning became clear to her. She was called to found a new community of sisters dedicated to the welfare of Native Americans and blacks. It was as the leader of her community, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, that Katharine would work out her salvation on earth. She became a saint of the Catholic Church for her spirituality and temporal works. When Bishop O’Connor wrote that he had destroyed some of her letters because of their personal nature, she presciently teased him back, “I nearly forgot to tell you that I was rather disappointed that you destroyed my letters. They might be needed for my canonization.”72

  On May 6, 1889, almost six years after she wrote Bishop James O’Connor her lists of reasons for and against a religious vocation, Catherine Mary Drexel entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy of Saint Mary’s Convent in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was to learn how to be a religious, how to live in community, and how to lead a community of women before starting out with her own sisters. She would be a postulant and a novice sister under obedience to the mistress of novices and the superior of the convent before taking her own vows as the founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People and moving back to her family home, St. Michel, until a new motherhouse could be built. Taking the name of Sister Mary Katharine Drexel, she became the first professed sister of her order on February 12, 1891. Except for the 1890 tragic death of her sister Elizabeth, newly married to George Walter Smith, and the death of Bishop O’Connor the same year, Katharine did not leave the Mercy Convent for twenty months. She spent her time with the Sisters of Mercy still seeking God’s will, praying, and waiting. It was a fairly quiet interlude before the great effort of launching a new order.

  This chapter has charted the development of Katharine Drexel’s youthful spirituality and the difficulty she had discerning her life’s vocation. Had she followed Bishop O’Connor’s initial and long-standing advice to remain a single woman, holy and philanthropic, there would have been no story about her at all. Had O’Connor simply agreed with her desire to become a nun after the death of her mother, the outcome for Katharine and those she eventually came to serve would have been quite different. A young woman in her middle twenties most probably would have been incapable of founding a congregation of sisters dedicated solely to the temporal and spiritual benefit of Native Americans and blacks. Had she gone into one of the contemplative orders, there to pray and meditate for the remainder of her days, would she have been recognized by the Catholic Church as a saint? No doubt she would have been just as holy as a contemplative sister; but would she have accomplished the profound good that she did through the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament? It took a woman who could defy a bishop to found and sustain a new order of women missionaries. Her firm strength of character in the face of hierarchical opposition was the result of her belief in the reality of her call from Christ. She could hold to such a conviction with tenacity because her deepened spirituality allowed her to hear and heed the word of her Lord. The fruit of her vocation is the subject of the next chapter. It will outline the trajectory of the order she founded, from its inception to its peak and decline.

  1. ASBS, vol. 1, July 8, 1873.

  2. ASBS, vol. 1, p. 31, January 1, 1874, emphasis in original. Hereafter, only emphasis added by the author will be noted.

  3. Sr. Patricia Lynch, SBS, Sharing the Bread in Service: Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1891-1991, 2 vols. (Bensalem, Pa.: Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1998), 1:14.

  4. ASBS, vol. 2, October 1873.

  5. MKD, Collected Journals, March 1874.

  6. ASBS, vol. 2, September 1876.

  7. ASBS, vol. 1, p. 3, January 1878.

  8. ASBS, vol. 1, p. 3, February 2, 1878.

  9. MKD, Collected Journals, May 1878.

  10. MKD, Collected Journals, 4, 1881. Date according to Anthony Costa, “The Spirituality of Saint Katharine Drexel: Eucharistic Devotion Nourishing Apostolic Works” (diss. for licentiate in theology, Pontificiam Universitatem S. Thomae, 2001), p. 12.

  11. Kenosis, though a common term today in discussions of spirituality, was not a term used in the context of nineteenth-century spirituality. The use of the term is fully developed in chapter 4.

  12. Costa, “Spirituality of Saint Katharine Drexel,” p. 12.

  13. St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. and ed. John K. Ryan (New York: Image Books, 1989), p. 185.

  14. MKD to O’Connor, May 21, 1883.

  15. O’Connor to MKD, May 26, 1883. In Dno means “in the Lord.”

  16. O’Connor to MKD, August 5, 1883.

  17. MKD to O’Connor, September 8, 1883.

  18. O’Connor to MKD, September 14, 1883.

  19. O’Connor to MKD, August 28, 1883.

  20. MKD to
O’Connor, October 8, 1883.

  21. O’Connor to MKD, October 25, 1883.

  22. MKD to O’Connor, November 20, 1883.

  23. O’Connor to MKD, December 16, 1883.

  24. MKD to O’Connor, January 27, 1884.

  25. O’Connor to MKD, February 15, 1884.

  26. O’Connor to MKD, August 1, 1884.

  27. St. Emma’s closed in 1972.

  28. ASBS, vol. 1, p. 48, 1874.

  29. MKD to O’Connor, August 1885, quoted in Sr. Consuela Duffy, SBS, Katharine Drexel: A Biography (Philadelphia: Reilly Co., 1966), p. 126.

  30. O’Connor to MKD, August 29, 1885.

  31. O’Connor to MKD, August 29, 1885.

  32. O’Connor to MKD, October 1, 1885.

  33. O’Connor to MKD, December 3, 1885.

  34. ELD to Cassidy, August 12, 1886.

  35. MKD to Cassidy, August 27, 1886.

  36. ELD to Cassidy, September 5, 1885.

  37. O’Connor to MKD, October 30, 1886.

  38. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 100. The dates of the two audiences the Drexel sisters had with Pope Leo XIII appear to have been January 27 and January 30, 1887. It is not known at which of these audiences Katharine had her private talk with Leo XIII.

  39. Quoted in Katherine Burton, The Golden Door: The Life of Katharine Drexel (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1957), p. 88.

  40. Burton, The Golden Door, p. 88.

  41. O’Connor to MKD, March 5, 1887.

  42. O’Connor to MKD, March 5, 1887.

  43. LBD Travel Journal, September 25, 1887.

  44. From Journal of LBD, quoted in Sr. M. Dolores Letterhouse, SBS, The Francis A. Drexel Family (Cornwells Heights, Pa.: Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1939), p. 322.

  45. MKD to O’Connor, October 13, 1887.

  46. Undated, but contained with various other 1887 writings by MKD. It appears to belong to her letter dated October 13, 1887, because in his letter of October 22, 1887, the bishop refers to her letter of the thirteenth and “the rule” as answers to her questions and makes suggestions for her reading.

  47. O’Connor to MKD, October 22, 1887.

  48. Burton, The Golden Door, pp. 106-7.

  49. Fr. Stephan to MKD, February 23, 1886.

  50. Letterhouse, Francis A. Drexel Family, p. 337.

  51. MKD to O’Connor, June 24, 1888.

  52. O’Connor to MKD, March 14, 1888.

  53. O’Connor to MKD, March 30, 1888.

  54. O’Connor to MKD, May 16, 1888.

  55. O’Connor to MKD, May 16, 1888.

  56. MKD to O’Connor, August 1888.

  57. MKD to O’Connor, written November 11, 1888, but not mailed until November 26, bundled with another letter written on the later date. Across the earlier letter she requested that he return his letter to her written on May 26, 1883. See pages 64-65 for the referenced correspondence. In Dno is Latin for “in the Lord.”

  58. MKD to O’Connor, November 26, 1888.

  59. O’Connor to MKD, November 30, 1888.

  60. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:31.

  61. Anne M. Butler, “Mother Katharine Drexel: Spiritual Visionary for the West,” in By Grit and by Grace: Eleven Women Who Shaped the American West, ed. Glenda Riley and Richard Etulain (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1997), p. 204.

  62. William H. Ketchum, Report of the Director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, in SBS Archives.

  63. In a congregation, or community, sisters renew annually what are called “simple vows” of poverty, chastity, and obedience and undertake an active ministry outside of the cloister. In orders, nuns make “solemn vows” of poverty, chastity, and obedience for life and live within the cloister leading a life of prayer and meditation. The terms “congregation” and “order,” as well as the terms “sister” and “nun,” tend to be used interchangeably. Today’s orders of nuns are no longer sequestered unless they choose to be so. Indeed, many sisters and nuns no longer live within convent walls.

  64. MKD to O’Connor, December 15, 1888.

  65. O’Connor to MKD, December 21, 1888.

  66. The first Sunday of Lent collection for Catholic Home Missions in the United States is a practice that continues to this day.

  67. MKD to O’Connor, February 12, 1889.

  68. O’Connor to MKD, February 12, 1889.

  69. O’Connor to MKD, February 16, 1889.

  70. MKD to O’Connor, February 24, 1889.

  71. O’Connor to MKD, February 28, 1889.

  72. MKD to O’Connor, June 24, 1888.

  Chapter 3

  Growth of the Order

  When Katharine Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People in 1891, it was one of 134 orders of Catholic women religious founded in the United States since its founding. It was one of 5 orders founded in the same year.1 When Mother Katharine died, there had been 343 orders of Catholic women religious established in the United States. Most orders were transplanted from Europe and never truly took root in American soil, and were disbanded after a few years; more failed than succeeded.2

  That Katharine’s order has endured to the present day is a mark of its founder’s vision and charism, despite the general apathy and occasional hostility of her fellow Americans and coreligionists to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and those they served, and despite the inherent harsh conditions in which the sisters found themselves, whether in the North, the South, the East, or the West.

  This chapter focuses on the growth of the order of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and mainly on the first forty-three years when the founder was still the mother general and active in its development, before summarizing its continued growth into the 1960s and eventual post–Vatican II decline to the present day. The establishment of the missions of St. Catherine’s (Santa Fe, New Mexico), St. Francis de Sales (Powhatan, Virginia), St. Michael’s (St. Michael’s, Arizona), Immaculate Mother (Nashville, Tennessee), Blessed Sacrament (Beaumont, Texas), and Xavier University (New Orleans, Louisiana) and the outlying southern Louisiana schools is discussed in some detail, as they illustrate the challenges and difficulties Katharine encountered in carrying out her mission to be a mother to the Native American and African American peoples. But first we must establish the internal context for the order, because it was an order that easily could have been stillborn.

  Katharine Drexel had reluctantly embraced Bishop O’Connor’s vision of an order founded for the benefit of “Indians and Colored People.” Newly ensconced in the Mercy Convent, she wrote to the bishop:

  This convent life is full of joy for me and I take a most unmortified satisfaction in this respite from responsibility, which brings me peace. There is one thought, however, which causes me unease — it is the thought of why I am here viz: — to prepare me for a future life of responsibility, and what is more, a life which is most apt to be one of opposition, trial, subject to even criticism of the Church. Then as it were to have the very salvation of so many hang as it were upon my instrumentality! The undertaking you proposed, Reverend Father, seems enormous and I shall freely acknowledge that my heart goes down in sorrow when I think of it. To be the head of a new order! New orders always, I think, have to pass through the baptism of the cross.

  All of these dismal thoughts are not generous to Our Lord, and in the chapel and meditation I am striving to overcome this selfishness and self-seeking, and to look upon the future life you propose for me with cheerfulness since you say it is the will of the Lord.3

  This
must have been a very difficult time for her as she tried to focus on the present and to ignore the daunting future: “I try to think just as little as I can about the new order, endeavoring to attend solely to my own progress in perfection.”4 She counted on Bishop O’Connor’s continuing support and comfort to sustain her.

  However, before she had even had her reception into the Mercy novitiate, O’Connor became ill. Archbishop Patrick John Ryan had to preside at her veiling on November 7, 1889. O’Connor had written to her that “nearly all the works destined to be of special service to the Church, began in trial,” but he did not realize how prescient he was in writing those words.5 He died on May 27, 1890. His death left Sister Katharine bereft of his support and consolation. She did not think that she could go on with the foundation of a new order without him. Archbishop Ryan offered her his support: “If I share the burden with you, if I help you, can you go on?”6 She could and did, but it was never easy, and the earliest days were the most difficult.