Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  Ask the Eternal Father what He wants of you. Vocation — all right. New Order — all right. Does God wish me to do anything better, or leave undone what I do?

  Resolve: Generously with no half-hearted, timorous dread of the opinions of Church and men to manifest my mission. To speak only and when it pleases God; but to lose no opportunity of speaking before priests and bearded men. Manifest yourself. You have no time to occupy your thoughts with that complacency or consideration of what others think. Your business is simply, “What will my Father in Heaven think?”37

  The strength of her resolve would be tested in Nashville. Race relations there were such that the white population was adamantly opposed to a black school near them. Mother Katharine proposed to buy a large house in a white neighborhood and convert it into a school for black girls. She could survey the property only from an enclosed carriage, lest the identity of the prospective buyer and her intentions be made known. The property was bought for $25,000 through a lawyer, Thomas Tyne, who turned the deed over to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Two days after the purchase, on February 13, 1905, the local newspaper printed the name of the purchaser and the intended use of the property. The white citizens read that a grammar school and several years of high school were about to open in their neighborhood. There was an uproar when the facts became known, and a battle was played out in the press and in the courts.

  The original owner tried to rescind the sale. Mother Katharine wrote to the banker who had owned the house, Samuel J. Keith, to try to mollify him. It is interesting that he had addressed his letter to her in care of Drexel & Company, rather than writing to her convent.

  My dear Sir:

  I am just in receipt of your letter of February 17, transmitted to me from Drexel & Company. I hasten to answer it, and to express my regret that you and your neighbors should feel as you do concerning the purchase of the property. I think there is some misapprehension on the part of you and your neighbors which I would like to remove. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who have purchased the property, are religious, of the same race as yourself. We will always endeavor in every way to be neighborly to any white neighbors in the vicinity; we have every reason to hope we may receive from our white neighbors the cordial courtesy for which the Southern people are so justly noted.

  It is true we intend to open an industrial school and academy for Colored girls, but the girls who come there will only be day scholars. In coming to the academy and returning to their homes, I am confident they will be orderly and cause no annoyance.

  I observed very carefully when in Nashville, that the property which we purchased was within very few blocks of numerous houses occupied by Colored families, and therefore, even were the property to be the residence of Colored teachers, which it is not, I think no just exception could be taken to the locality selected.

  I can fully realize, I think, how you feel about your old revered home, around which so many attachments of the past — the sweet relations of home life — hover. I acknowledge I feel the same with regard to mine, and confess that some time ago, when passing it in the trolley cars, when I saw a bill of sale on it, a whole crowd of fond recollections of father, mother, sisters, etc., came vividly to my imagination. Then I more than ever realized how all things temporal pass away, and that there is but one home, strictly speaking, that eternal home where we all hope to meet our own, and where there will be no separation any more. And so temporal things, after all, are only to be valued, inasmuch as they bring us and many others — as many as possible — to the same eternal joy for which we were created.

  With warmest trust that all misapprehensions be removed, believe me,

  Very sincerely yours,

  M. M. Katharine

  (Drexel)38

  Keith’s apprehensions were not removed by her letter. He offered the bishop $2,500, to be given to any Catholic charity the bishop might choose, if he would prohibit the establishment of a school for African American children on his former property. The bishop demurred in support of Mother Katharine. Keith then published her personal letter to him as a paid advertisement in the Banner of Nashville. Mother Katharine was unhappy to see her private correspondence in a public newspaper.

  When the men failed to dissuade Mother Katharine from her objective, the women in the neighborhood took up their collective pen. They wrote the following to her in a joint letter: “In conclusion, we beg to say that we highly appreciate and cordially commend your worthy enterprise among the Colored People. There are a number of localities in and around the city where Colored People live, and where no objection would be made to the location of your school. On the contrary, it would be welcomed as a distinct good and a social blessing.”39 For those women, any place but in their own neighborhood would have been acceptable. Having once been burned by having her personal letter published, Mother Katharine did not respond to the women and went on quietly establishing her school. She wrote, however, to her sisters:

  I cannot tell you how I regret that any letter of mine on the subject should appear in print. The very best is to let the whole affair die out — at least in the press if it won’t die out before the Mayor and the City Council. If the Apostles were sent as sheep amongst the wolves, they were told, therefore, be as wise as serpents harmless as doves. To have this matter stirred up in the press is only to fan the flame. I have resolved not to answer another letter sent me by these parties, since they come out in the press. It seems but prudent to protect our cause by being very quiet, since there seems to be a certain prejudice which I hope will blow over by quietly minding our preservation of the good we have undertaken without aggressiveness. . . .

  It is encouraging to meet some opposition in your work. . . . It is appropriate for a Convent of the Blessed Sacrament — Christ dwelling within us — and the School of the Immaculate Mother, to have people of the city have no room for our precious Charge. They say, “There is another place on the City’s outskirts,” for our educational work. How truly was the Cave of Bethlehem the great educator of the World! This was indeed the School of the Immaculate Mother.40

  Despite the opposition from some white citizens of Nashville, Immaculate Mother opened on September 5, 1905, with a mass celebrated in the school chapel by Bishop Byrne and attended by the sisters, their 54 pupils, and a few well-wishers. The newly opened school attracted attention from another group of protestors. Byrne had originally planned a school for Catholic students only. However, Katharine Drexel stressed to him that her mission was to Indians and colored people, regardless of their religion, and that if he wanted her to open a school for black children in his diocese, it would have to be a school open to those of all religions. Her stance was confirmed by a vote of the SBS Council. The invitation to black parents to enroll their children in Immaculate Mother looked like an attempt at sheep stealing to Protestant black ministers. Their anti-Catholic sentiment surfaced because they did not want their members’ children attending a Catholic school. Parents seemed undaunted by the opposition to the school and signed up their daughters in great numbers. The original building was outgrown by the end of the first year, and by the spring of 1907, a new building served 195 students. Active opposition to Immaculate Mother School disappeared.

  Its only other serious trial was an outbreak of typhoid in 1908 that killed one of the sisters. What it could not survive — and none can lament it — was the integration of public schools in 1954, when Immaculate Mother closed and the students were transferred to the Cathedral School and Fr. Ryan High School.

  The opposition to the establishment of Immaculate Mother was a very civilized affair compared to that encountered in other places. Perhaps the most frightening demonstration of resistance occurred in Beaumont, Texas, for the Ku Klux Klan was very active in that part of Texas. In 1917, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, at the invitation of the bishop, established a mission school for African American children and built a small parish church in Be
aumont. In the early 1920s, race relations in large northern cities, throughout the South, and especially in southern Texas deteriorated greatly. There was money to be made in the new Texas oil fields, but white laborers predominated and would not allow African Americans any jobs, except the lowest-paying ones. Blacks who had served in racially segregated units in the armed forces during World War I had experienced social freedom and equality in Britain and Europe. They were beginning to demand the same at home. In Beaumont, the Ku Klux Klan openly suppressed African Americans. Many of the city’s prominent judges and politicians belonged to the Klan. The sisters complained to their mother general, “No civic protection can be hoped for, because all the officials here belong to the infamous party.”41 In March 1922, the Klan posted a sign outside the church that served the mission school and convent that read, “We want an end of services here. We will not stand by while white priests consort with nigger wenches in the faces of our families. Suppress it in one week or flogging and tar and feathers will follow.” The next sign read, “If people continue to come to this church, we will dynamite it.” The Klan had already tarred and feathered one of the parishioners and run his family out of town. The Klan also tarred and feathered a “sympathizing” judge and held a Klan march through town. The situation looked desperate for the church. Katharine Drexel offered bodyguards for the priests (the sisters had not been threatened with harm) and also guards for the property. The sisters’ protection was unceasing prayer. On March 25, a severe rainstorm with thunder and lightning spawned a tornado that picked up and destroyed two buildings that were known Klan headquarters. The Beaumont Klan never threatened the church or mission again, but its original intent had been far more dangerous than what had happened earlier in Nashville.

  The same subterfuge of having to buy property through third parties due to racism and anti-Catholic bigotry, as in Nashville, would be carried out time and again by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, most notably in the establishment of Xavier University in New Orleans.

  In the intervening ten years between Immaculate Mother and the expansion of the sisters into southern Louisiana, the order grew by about fifty new sisters. It was a slow but steady increase that allowed the sisters to open twelve new missions, only one of which was in the West. While, in general, the sisters were occupied in their schools and missions, their founder had to take care of practical matters pertaining to the establishment of a new order. For instance, in their early years, the SBS operated under the Mercy Rule. The SBS Rule received its initial approval from the Vatican in 1907. Mother Katharine followed the advice she received from Mother St. Frances Xavier Cabrini: “If you want to get your Rule approved, you go yourself to Rome and take it with you.” She went to Rome and helped the rule through its translation into Latin and acceptance, first, by the Sacred Congregation for the Propaganda of the Faith and, then, by Pope Pius X. In 1911, Archbishop Ryan, who had been Katharine’s firm supporter for twenty years, died. While she continued to have friends and supporters in the hierarchy, none was ever again as important to her. Her rule reached the end of its five-year testing period in 1912.

  That year the order ventured into Harlem in New York City, where Mother Katharine contracted typhoid fever after she cleaned and helped renovate two old buildings for a school and convent. When she developed the full symptoms of the disease, she was in the West, making her annual visits to the missions there. She did not want to alarm her sisters, so merely wrote that they should pray hard for a special intention for her. She finally became so ill with the typhoid and pneumonia that her brother-in-law, Colonel Morrell, went west to bring her back to Philadelphia. At Christmas she wrote to her sisters, “Of all the Christmasses in the past, this is the Christmas in which it behooves me to thank you for the efficacy of your prayers through Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Your prayers have made me well, thank God. . . .”42

  By the next spring, she was fully recovered and able to travel to Rome to make final adjustments in the rule and to get it approved. On her ship was a bishop, Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland, eighteen of his priests, and seventy laypeople, all making a pilgrimage to Rome. The non-Catholics on the ship, Invernia, must have felt like they had gotten on the wrong boat. There were several masses daily, benedictions, and processions of the Blessed Sacrament twice a day, and the Sacrament was exposed for adoration all day long. Mother Katharine was delighted. Mother Mercedes, her traveling companion, noticed that her superior spent two hours each day kneeling in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. While in Rome, it turned out that her cousin, Lucy Drexel Dahlgren, and her daughter, resided in a suite at the Barberini Palace, where they offered rooms to the two sisters. Dahlgren tempted Mother Katharine with the money she would save by staying with her. However, the spirit of poverty overtook Mother Katharine, who worried, “What about precedence? Will any of my Sisters feel they should partake of the hospitality of their friends because my example in Rome would lead them to infer that I approved such a step?”43 Another offer of hospitality, which she accepted, came from some American Franciscan sisters who had a convent in Rome. A convent was much more to her liking than a Renaissance palace. The rule achieved its final approval on May 15, 1913.

  Their business concluded, the sisters returned home by way of Germany and Ireland, where they sought vocations for the order. This sweep through Germany and Ireland garnered them four vocations. Eventually over one hundred young women would find their way to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament from Ireland. Many who came had not sufficient education to enter directly into the order, so a junior novitiate high school was opened at the motherhouse to accommodate their needs and those of other girls who thought they might have a vocation. Blessed Sacrament High School operated from 1931 to 1952 and was an important element in providing sisters for the Native American and African American missions and schools. Nearly one hundred sisters of the order began their vocations at Blessed Sacrament High School.

  Xavier University, New Orleans, Louisiana

  The founding of Xavier University in New Orleans provides a good opportunity to study the order’s growing influence on Catholic education for Native American and African American children and youth. Mother Katharine had purposely stayed away from forming schools and missions in or around New Orleans because the city was the home of an African American order, the Sisters of the Holy Family, even though the bishop of New Orleans had approached her time and again about the great need of his black Catholics. She responded with funds to support the building and maintenance of schools and teaching salaries for the Sisters of the Holy Family and other sisters and priests who taught African Americans in New Orleans and across southern Louisiana. The following is a typical letter from Archbishop Francis Janssens: “There is nothing in my administration of the diocese that worries me more than our Colored People. I cannot find the means to counteract those who try to capture them. In other dioceses they may look out for conversions of Colored People and I have to look out for perversions. I often feel discouraged. With your kindness to our diocese in the way of pecuniary help, please add the prayers of the community for me.”44 When a hurricane drowned two thousand of his people and damaged or destroyed six churches and a convent, he turned quite naturally to Mother Katharine for aid: “I am downcast and feel sick at heart. But the name of the Lord is blessed. You and the Sisters must pray a little more for me.”45 Later in the same year, he was pressured by both whites and blacks over the issue of creating separate churches for black Catholics to attend.

  Our white Catholics are unwilling to help the Negro for Church and school purposes; and many influential Negroes, especially Mulattos, are opposed to special Colored churches, not because they go to church themselves, but because they imagine the different churches will tend to a greater social separation. I tell them they keep all the privileges they have and that they can continue to go to the white churches, but they do not want to understand it. A separate congregation is a trial, and I think here, where we
have two-thirds of all the Colored Catholics in the United States, this ought to be given a fair trial. If we succeed, we will have far less difficulty with the following; and if we, after giving it a fair trial, fail, we will simply give it up for the future; and console ourselves with the thought that we tried, did our best and could do no better. If these reasons seem good to you, please lay them before Archbishop Ryan, saving me the trouble of writing the same thing twice. I hope I do not bother you too much; you know I do it because I want to do my duty toward the Colored people.46

  His was not the only diocese where black Catholics were requesting churches of their own. The usual practice in American Catholic churches called for racially mixed parishes, with certain pews reserved for African Americans. At the end of the nineteenth century, African Americans in larger cities were asking their bishops to establish parishes especially for them. Some bishops resisted the idea of separate parishes, but Bishop Janssens thought it was a reasonable request and sought to accommodate his black Catholics. He opened black parishes, as did the bishops in Cincinnati, Boston, and other dioceses. It was a measure that made sense given the social relations of the races at the time. Separate but equal facilities for the races would become, unfortunately, the law of the land with the 1896 Supreme Court decision on the Louisiana case Plessy v. Ferguson. While they may have been separate, the reality is that facilities for African Americans were never equal to those for whites. Educational standards for white students were appallingly low in the old Confederacy; they were abominable for blacks. In 1900, in one Louisiana parish (county) school district, white children reportedly went to school from four to eight months a year while black children went from three to six months.47 In spite of this fact, Archbishop Janssens was sincerely trying everything he could to help the African Americans in New Orleans, and Mother Katharine was his natural friend and ally.