Mother Katharine Drexel
Page 19
The Retirement of Mother Katharine
Larger classes of postulants joined the SBS in the 1930s than in any other decade. There were 134 newly professed sisters from 1931 to 1940. The country endured the worst of the Great Depression during this period, and the order served in an increasing number of important missions, so it is not surprising that young women would seek the security of convent life that also offered them interesting and significant work in evangelization and social justice.
The decade also saw the retirement of Katharine Drexel. In 1937, after forty-six years of actively leading her sisters in missions throughout the United States, the seventy-eight-year-old Mother Katharine retired from the active leadership of the congregation. When she suffered from typhoid and pneumonia, the doctor also detected some heart irregularity in the founder. In 1920, she spent six weeks in the infirmary recovering from angina. In 1923, Mother Mary Agatha, SBS, wrote to Bishop Jules B. Jeanmard of Lafayette, Louisiana, that Mother Katharine “simply and utterly ignores herself. . . . She refuses [her body] the rest and nourishment which everyone but herself deems necessary.”64 Mother Katharine, however, considered herself “fine, fat, [and] splendid” and hoped that her sisters were “3/4 or 100% as well.”65 In fact, she was not well. She suffered two heart attacks in 1935 and a third in 1936. Her physicians warned her that to preserve her life, she must turn over the reins. She told her doctor, “Nobody is necessary for God’s work. God can do the work without any of His Creatures.” Her doctor replied, “Certainly, Mother, I agree with you, but ordinarily He does not.”66 Once the dictum was given and accepted, she cheerfully retired into the contemplative life she had originally desired. She briefly led the order during the period between the death of her immediate successor, Mother Mercedes, and the election of the third superior general, Mother Mary of the Visitation, in 1940. Her last communal act as the founder of her order was to lead the prayers for the congregation on September 27, 1940, when the sister in charge lost her place.
In 1941 the order celebrated its fiftieth birthday. “The little band of 13 which had left the Mercy Convent in 1891 had now swelled to over 500. Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament were serving in 25 dioceses, 49 elementary schools, 13 high schools, and Xavier University.”67 There was a large, public golden jubilee celebration that lasted for three days in April, but the order celebrated quietly on February 12, the actual date of Mother Katharine’s profession. She addressed her spiritual daughters on that day.
I just want to say this to the Sisters. I want to say that I thank God I am a child of the Church. I thank God it was my privilege to meet many of the great missionaries of the Church and to have had the prayers of those great missionaries like Monsignor Stephan and Bishop Marty. We have been reading about them in the refectory. . . . I saw them in their agony, those great souls! I thank God He gave me the grace to see their lives. They are a part of the Church of God, and I thank God like the great St. Theresa that I, too, am a child of the Church.
Scores of priests and bishops either attended the larger celebration or sent their best wishes. Cardinal Denis Dougherty wrote about Mother Katharine in his foreword to the jubilee booklet:
If she had done nothing else than set such an example to a frivolous, self-seeking world, she should be regarded as a benefactress to the human race. . . . She had won it all without the blare of trumpets; her picture never appears on the front page of our papers; her name is not to be found in the lists of great women . . . for the world knows only its own. . . . Whilst others persecute and revile Indians and Negroes as if they are mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, rather than God’s children for whom our Savior’s Blood was shed, she, a refined lady of culture, takes them into her heart and makes their cause her own.68
Mother Katharine took an active interest in her sisters and their missions as long as she was physically able. She continued to write and to see occasional visitors throughout World War II. One item that caught her attention during the war was a safe the sisters had constructed to protect the consecrated hosts of the Blessed Sacrament, lest Jesus be injured in an air raid on the American homeland.69 The presence of Christ in the Eucharist was real to Katharine. Because of her devotion to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, she prayed for everyone in the war. Her nocturnal adoration for June 29, 1944, even included Hitler:
The altar of the Sacred Heart is in this room where my Jesus, both priest and victim, offers Himself up six times each week and is as really offered as upon the Cross on Calvary. There on the Cross, He looks out over all the world and sees only souls to save. I have the immense privilege of having the priest offer it up for all our valiant soldiers, their salvation, their chaplains, and for all those who die now by being bombed, for all the Germans, even for Hitler, even for myself. Father, forgive them.70
In 1946, Mother Katharine wrote what would be her last Christmas letter to her sisters. She commented on the deaths of three of the older sisters and the need for the younger sisters to come to the fore “to continue the work of those who have gone on before them.” She exhorted them: “Lean on your Guardian Angels, for God has given them charge of you ‘to guide you in all your ways.’ ”71 “Holy Angels!” is what she would say when she was particularly pleased or even vexed. Until her death, she worried about the children of the missions. In 1935, she wrote to her sisters about their care. “Keep the children happy. If they love the school and all the Sisters, you will have done much towards winning them to the Church. Keep the children happy. God wants it.”72 As she lay dying twenty years later, it was still the children she was thinking about. Looking vacantly about, she asked the sister who was sitting with her during the night, “Did you see them? The children. Oh all the children were there, all going past, so many of them. And the Pope was there too in all his regalia, and so many children.”73 The founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament died on March 3, 1955.
By the Numbers: Peak and Decline
The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, despite the enthusiasm and obvious strength of their founder and the value of their apostolate, did not share in the impressive growth of other orders of nuns in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.74 The order finally opened its novitiate doors to African American applicants, perhaps in response to the low numbers of new postulants. The first two African American women to enter the novitiate were graduates of Xavier University. They joined in 1950 and were followed over the years by no fewer than twenty black women. Mother Mary of the Visitation was the SBS superior general at the time the first black sisters entered. She had been with Mother Katharine many years earlier in New Orleans when the superior general of the Holy Family Sisters asked Mother Katharine not to accept black applicants into the SBS because she “believed it would hurt the Negro congregations.”75 More than fifty years later, such promises could no longer be kept. The first black member of the order, Sr. Juliana Haynes, made her first vows the year the founder died and was the president of the SBS at the time of Katharine’s beatification. In an interview, she said she really had not known who Katharine was and that it was the order’s devotion to the Blessed Sacrament that first attracted her to the SBS. “And then, when I heard the work of the congregation, that is when I knew it was for me.”76 It was not until the founder died that she realized her importance.
At the time of Mother Katharine’s death, there were 501 SBS, including Sr. Juliana, in 51 convents. They staffed 49 elementary schools, 12 high schools, 1 university, 3 houses of social service, and 1 study house. Additionally, they staffed 37 missions in 20 states and the District of Columbia.77
With the passing of Katharine, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament no longer had the income from the Drexel estate to fund their activities. The income for 1955 had been $410,000. Adjustments would have to be made, even though Archbishop John F. O’Hara of Philadelphia arranged with the beneficiaries of Francis Drexel’s will and the diocese to help fund the SBS for the next ten years. In 1965, all diocesan financi
al support of Katharine Drexel’s order ceased.
Perhaps one of the most controversial decisions the founder ever made was not to secure her order financially through an endowment and not to challenge the stipulations of her father’s will. Early on she had decided not to endow the order while she was still receiving an income from the Drexel estate. She took seriously her vow of poverty, and she fully believed in divine Providence to sustain her apostolate; if it be the will of God, her order would endure. Furthermore, she feared that the larger Catholic Church would relinquish any responsibility for the blacks and Native Americans if it was perceived that she was fully supporting the missions herself. The decision not to challenge her father’s will had a similar logic. Her father’s will stipulated that should all his daughters die without issue, his estate would be distributed to the original twenty-nine specified beneficiaries. Naturally, he had no knowledge of the course of his second daughter’s life. Had he known that she would found an order of nuns, it is reasonable to assume that he would have wanted her order to receive at least that portion of his estate that had been hers. It is also reasonable to assume that a competent estate attorney could have convinced a judge to set aside her father’s will so the SBS could inherit his estate after her death. Her decision not to challenge the will is not detailed in the archives. The chapter meeting when it was discussed, immediately after Katharine retired, was considered confidential, and its debates and proceedings went unrecorded. Her decision was a complex one that hinged on her always obedient stance toward her father and his wishes, her understanding of the importance of communal poverty for the congregation, and, again, her utter dependence on the providence of God. She wrote to her sisters, “You will have no peace of soul until you arrive at total abandonment of self and all things into the Hands of God.”78
The apostolate of the SBS continues today with the fees and tuitions the order charges for their schools, retreats, and conferences; donations; professional fund-raising since 1967; a small endowment set up by Louise Drexel Morrell for the order; funds from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Home Missions; the sale of properties, particularly of St. Michel, the old Drexel summer home in Torresdale that had been the first convent and novitiate for the sisters; and, since 1966, Social Security payments for sisters over sixty-five years of age.
Between 1964, when there were 551 sisters, and 1991, when there were only 328 professed sisters, the order still managed to open forty-one new convents and missions or schools. Many older convents and schools closed during this period, and not even all the forty-one new undertakings survived the period. The number is partially explained by the fact that after the Second Vatican Council, the General Council of the SBS allowed for individual apostolates. Sisters, individually or in very small groups, would open missions in urban areas to serve the poor African Americans there. These individual apostolates are counted in the order’s records as SBS missions. The declining number of sisters in the order and the ever diminishing number of missions must have created a circular problem for the order. Less money and fewer sisters meant fewer missions. Fewer missions meant fewer opportunities for the sisters.
The number of vocations fell off not only for the SBS but also for all orders following Vatican II. From 1966, when the total number of women religious in the United States reached its height of 181,421, until 1990, when there were 103,269 women religious in the country, a decline of 44 percent, the SBS suffered a decline of 40 percent.79 By comparison, according to the figures supplied by George Stewart in Marvels of Charity, from 1965 to 1990 the Franciscan sisters lost 48 percent, the Benedictines 44 percent, and the Dominicans 49 percent.
The Rise and Fall of the Number of Sisters in the United States
By Date Ending In
Total U.S. Sistersa
New SBS
Total Professed SBSb
1900
46,583
67
64
1910
61,944
52
108
1920
90,558
108
207
1930
134,339
96
284
1940
164,273
134
379
1950
179,657
104
456
1960
184,353
61
476
1965
209,000
551
1970
194,941
41
446
1980
141,115
12
390
1990
111,481
10
328
2000
78,094c
6d
255d
2006
68,634f
2d
183d
2012
54,018f
0e
124e
a.Except where otherwise indicated, figures taken from Stewart, Marvels of Charity, pp. 564-65.
b.Except where otherwise indicated, SBS numbers based on data supplied by Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 2:297-303.
c.Kathleen Sparrow Cummings, “Change of Habit,” Notre Dame Magazine Online, Autumn 2003 (accessed August 1, 2006).
d.Figure supplied by the Public Relations Office of the SBS to the author on August 1, 2006.
e.Figure supplied by the SBS archivist, Stephanie Morris, Ph.D.
f.Figure supplied by the online services of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, February 14, 2013.
Various reasons can be given for the decline in vocations. The general secularization in society and the crisis in the Church following Vatican Council II are primary. Growing prosperity and the women’s movement brought important economic and social gains to all women. As more middle-class women gained higher education and entered the general U.S. workforce, the sisterhood no longer seemed an attractive “career.” Other avenues were open besides the traditional teaching and nursing. If one were inclined, one could do the same kind of work among the poor without suffering the limitations imposed by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Many women no longer found the idea of the religious life appealing or relevant. For some, the post–Vatican II Church was not moving fast enough. Indeed, it was not just a problem of attracting new vocations; many sisters were leaving the order.
Twenty-three percent of the nuns who were members of the SBS in 1964 left the order.80 For the seventy-three years preceding Vatican II, only 10 sisters who had made perpetual vows had departed. In the first ten years after the council, 6
1 women who had made their perpetual vows received Indults of Secularization, and 34 of the sisters in temporary vows withdrew before making their final vows. In June 1970, there were 446 sisters in the order, including those in temporary vows. By 1980, the number had dropped to 390 through deaths and withdrawals. By 1990, the SBS had lost another 79 women, for a total of 309 professed sisters. While priests who were laicized after Vatican II usually married, ex-sisters did not. Most found work as teachers and social workers.81
Another plausible reason for the decline in the number of women attracted to the SBS is the change in the social and political climate of the country during the 1960s and 1970s. A more militant African American social and political agenda was promoted by the less moderate leaders of the black power movement. This militancy drove a wedge in the ranks of those who had supported the earlier civil rights movement.
In the spirit of their founder, the SBS continued to support civil rights for blacks and to be active in the civil rights movement. In 1959, Sister Consuela Marie Duffy, SBS, was a witness in a U.S. civil rights suit against Harrison County, Mississippi, after police officers would not allow her Xavier University History Club to picnic on a public beach. Sisters of the order supported African Americans in their struggle for civil rights. They prayed with black Americans, and they marched in the streets with them in the 1950s and 1960s.