Mother Katharine Drexel
Page 20
However, by the mid-1960s, race relations in the country were taking a turn many white citizens could not understand. In August 1965, the predominantly African American community of Watts in Los Angeles erupted into a full-scale riot. It may have been the first race riot in the country begun by blacks, and it left thirty-four dead and over one thousand injured. In July 1967, Detroit was the scene of an ugly race riot that left forty-two dead. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, riots broke out in over 168 U.S. cities and towns. At the time, the leader of the United Black Front, Lincoln Lynch, was quoted as saying, “It is imperative to abandon the unconditional non-violent concept expounded by Dr. King and adopt the position that for every Martin Luther King who falls, 10 white racists will go down with him. There is no other way — America understands no other language.”82 These actions and this rhetoric were no longer seen by many as emblematic of a race riot, but of a race war. Many who had been part of the cadre willing to support civil rights no longer could do so. Indeed, legal structures were in place to ensure civil rights for blacks, such as voting rights, fair housing practices, and the legal integration of schools. The political obstacles African Americans had faced in the initial years of the SBS mission no longer existed. In the face of civil unrest and violent demands, fewer and fewer young women were interested in the apostolate of the order. They could put up with being called “nigger sister” when the cause seemed just, but in the late 1960s events changed the racial climate in the United States. For many, it was not a fight they wanted to join.
Of course, what happened to Native Americans in all this racial uproar is more difficult to establish. They traditionally have been a much more invisible and smaller population in the United States. The Indians were the first to benefit from Katharine Drexel’s vision, and they too had their moments of public struggle. Native Americans are members of separate nations or tribes. There had been no successful pan-Indian movement for civil rights until the late 1960s, when Native Americans began to borrow tactics from the civil rights movement. The American Indian Movement (AIM) made national headlines when it seized Alcatraz Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay in 1968. AIM successfully occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., in 1972. Most spectacularly, AIM supporters had a standoff with federal law enforcement officers at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. Wounded Knee was the site of the last armed conflict of the nineteenth-century Indian wars. On December 29, 1890, an overwhelmingly superior force of the U.S. cavalry killed 153 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children in what has been called the Massacre at Wounded Knee. While the Wounded Knee incident of 1973 was undoubtedly a symbolic struggle, it did not symbolize the same thing to all. Again, like the African Americans in Watts, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., Native Americans lost a great deal of sympathy by their actions, however honorable their intentions. Some of the losers in these racial conflicts were the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, whose founder had pledged herself to be “as a mother to the Indians and Colored People.” It was a pledge that no longer made sense to a number of people.
One can imagine that young women of the last decade of the nineteenth century or of the early decades of the twentieth century could romanticize and idealize the plights of peoples largely unknown and unseen by them. When frightful images of death and destruction and jarring confrontational rhetoric become nightly fare on the television news, it is easy to understand why young women might wish to put their talents in other places than the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
However, Katharine Drexel and her sisters were never dedicated only to civil rights, education, and social work. Their goal was, and is still, directed toward the spiritual well-being of those of their apostolate. While Native Americans and African Americans have a special place in their ministry, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament are now open to the needs of those of all races. Their present mission statement reads as follows: “As Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, we believe God calls us to be a sign in the world of the power of the Eucharistic Christ to effect unity and community among all peoples. Guided by the spirit of Katharine Drexel we are called to share the gospel message with the poor, especially among the Black and Native-American peoples and to challenge the deeply rooted injustice in the world today.”83
They are called Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament because they find sustenance in the Sacrament for themselves and desire to bring others to Jesus in the Sacrament. The greatly reduced number of sisters has in some ways brought the SBS back to where it started. The order presently maintains only three schools, including Xavier Preparatory School in Louisiana and St. Michael’s Indian High School and Grammar School in Arizona. The rest of the sisters are either in apostolates across fifteen states or at the motherhouse, where there are approximately 100 sisters, including 55 who are retired.84 There are, at the time of this writing, 124 sisters and no novices. As in the days of Katharine Drexel, the SBS supports the missions of bishops and other orders by distributing nearly $150,000 annually. However circumscribed and reduced their actual missionary field has become, the sisters continue to be faithful to the vision of their founder and the vows they made to serve the Church by serving blacks and Indians. In 1990, they even managed to open a small mission outside the country, in Haiti, to serve the people there. They may be daunted but are not defeated by their present situation.
Like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, faithfulness, not success, is what the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament pray for, and is the quality by which they want to be judged. Indeed, as previously quoted, Mother Katharine wrote to her sisters, “Success is not the criterion of the spiritual life.”85 Her order’s very existence and its continuing apostolate serve as a legacy to Katharine Drexel’s kenotic and eucharistic spirituality. But it would be wrong to maintain that the order was all of her legacy; in fact, her order may cease to exist one day. Katharine Drexel was granted a much larger legacy by Pope John Paul II when he canonized her. Her spirituality, the subject of the next chapter, is what sustained her throughout her life, and, in canonizing her, the pope suggested that her spirituality could serve as a model for other Christians.
1. Of the orders established in 1891, the Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary and the Little Sisters of the Assumption were from France, the Sisters of the Assumption were from France by way of Canada, and the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception were a new American order.
2. George C. Stewart Jr., Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1994).
3. MKD to O’Connor, May 12, 1889.
4. MKD to O’Connor, May 31, 1889.
5. December 27, 1888.
6. ASBS, vol. 3, p. 110.
7. 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), 1:401 n. 24.
8. Sr. Consuela Duffy, SBS, Katharine Drexel: A Biography (Philadelphia: Reilly Co., 1966), p. 179.
9. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:60-67.
10. Perfectae Caritatis, 35.2, in The Sixteen Documents of Vatican II, introduced by Douglas Bushman; gen. ed., Marianne Lorraine Trouvé (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1999).
11. Optatam Totius, 11, in The Sixteen Documents of Vatican II.
12. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:42.
13. ASBS, vol. 3, p. 22.
14. ASBS, vol. 3, p. 146.
15. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 176.
16. OASBS, p. 73, 1892.
17. ASBS, vol. 3, p. 188, no date.
18. ASBS, vol. 4, p. 20, 1893.
19. ASBS, vol. 1, p. 127.
20. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 191.
21. ASBS, vol. 4, p. 146, September 1894.
22. ASBS, vol. 4,
p. 154, September 1894.
23. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 207.
24. MKD to SBS at St. Francis de Sales, December 1899.
25. MKD to St. Catherine’s, August 1913. Quoted in Lou Baldwin, St. Katharine Drexel: Apostle to the Oppressed, ed. Rev. Paul S. Quinter, Elena Bucciarelli, and Frank Coyne (Philadelphia: Catholic Standard and Times, 2000), p. 148.
26. December 14, 1896. Mr. Walker had also served Mother Katharine in the same capacity at St. Catherine’s.
27. Fr. Stephan to MKD, August 12, 1997.
28. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 219.
29. ASBS, vol. 7, p. 13, no date.
30. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:111.
31. ASBS, vol. 7, p. 29, no date.
32. MKD to St. Michael’s, April 9, 1902.
33. Katherine Burton, The Golden Door: The Life of Katharine Drexel (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1957), p. 153.
34. ASBS, vol. 7, pp. 54-55.
35. Quoted in Baldwin, St. Katharine Drexel, p. 121, no date.
36. Quoted in Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:144.
37. May 1889.
38. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, pp. 257-58.
39. ASBS, vol. 8, p. 177, July 1905.
40. July 14, 1905, quoted in Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 259.
41. Mother Mary of the Visitation to MKD, March 21, 1922.
42. MKD to SBS, December 25, 1912.
43. ASBS, vol. 9, p. 114, May 1913.
44. Janssens to MKD, August 8, 1893.
45. Janssens to MKD, October 7, 1893.
46. Janssens to MKD, November 11, 1893.
47. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 319.
48. Letter from Pierre O. Lebeau, SSJ, to MKD, September 15, 1906, quoted in Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:219.
49. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:413 n. 67.
50. Louise Drexel Morrell and her husband Edward funded the building of Epiphany College in Baltimore for the Josephite Fathers, where priests could be educated who would then serve in their missions and schools for African Americans.
51. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:226.
52. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 330.
53. Quoted in Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:226.
54. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:227.
55. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:234.
56. Quoted in Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:273.
57. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:275. No further reference given.
58. Pepper to MKD, December 28, 1924.
59. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:275.
60. Quoted in Amy MacKenzie, “Walter White on Lynching,” Interracial Review, September 1946, online.
61. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:278.
62. White to MKD, May 20, 1937.
63. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 1:339-43.
64. Mother Mary Agatha to Jeanmard, May 2, 1927.
65. MKD to motherhouse, October 7, 1930.
66. ASBS, vol. 29, p. 141, 1936.
67. Lou Baldwin, A Call to Sanctity: The Formation and Life of Mother Katharine Drexel (Philadelphia: Catholic Standard and Times, 1987), p. 80.
68. Denis Dougherty, foreword to the Golden Jubilee Booklet, 1891-1941, by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (Cornwells Heights, Pa.: Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1941), p. 3.
69. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 2:387.
70. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, p. 371.
71. Baldwin, St. Katharine Drexel, p. 190.
72. ASBS, vol. 38, p. 138.
73. The sister was Consuela Marie Duffy, who recorded it in her biography, Katharine Drexel, p. 376.
74. See chart on p. 142 for a decade-by-decade count of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in relation to the total number of American sisters.
75. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 2:7.
76. Baldwin, A Call to Sanctity, p. 95.
77. Duffy, Katharine Drexel, pp. 271-72.
78. MKD, Conferences, Counsels, and Maxims of a Missionary Foundress, p. 44, in the archives of the motherhouse, 1935.
79. Thomas C. Reeves, Twentieth Century America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 158; Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 259; Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 2:108; Stewart, Marvels of Charity, p. 461.
80. Lynch, Sharing the Bread, 2:108.
81. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), p. 438.
82. BBC online, April 6, 1968.
83. SBS Web site.
84. The number of states varies from year to year. Presently, there are SBS in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia.
85. MKD, Reflections on Religious Life (Bensalem, Pa.: Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1983), p. 25.
Photo Gallery
Figure 1. Francis Martin Drexel, grandfather to Katharine (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 2. Hanna Langstroth Drexel, Katharine’s birth mother (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 3. Francis Anthony Drexel and Emma Bouvier Drexel, Katharine’s
father and stepmother (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 4. Katharine and Elizabeth Drexel (ca. 1860) (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 5. Katharine at about age eight (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 6. The “All
Three,” Katharine,
Louise, and Elizabeth
(ca. 1867) (Archives of the
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 7. St. Michel’s Sunday School, taught by Elizabeth and Katharine
at the Drexel family summer home in Torresdale, Pennsylvania
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 8. Katharine, driving her horse, Roland, at the family’s summer home (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 9. Elizabeth Drexel in Paris (ca. 1875) (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 10. Pope Leo XIII.
In 1883 he suggested to
Katharine that she become
a missionary (Courtesy of
Creative Commons)
Figure 11. Katharine at Rosebud Mission. She is in a tall black hat
in the right rear (1887). (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 12. Bishop Martin Marty, vicar apostolic of northern Minnesota. He appealed to Katharine in 1885 for funds for a school on the Rosebud Reservation (Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries)
Figure 13. Msgr. Joseph A. Stephan,
director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions and a close collaborator with Katharine. He was with Bishop Marty when he first met Katharine in 1885
(Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries)
Figure 14. Katharine as bridesmaid for Louise (1885) (Archives of the Sisters of
the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 15. Bishop James O’Connor, spiritual adviser to Katharine. He first suggested to her that she found an order of sisters to serve Native Americans and African Amer
icans (Archives of the Archdiocese of Omaha)
Figure 16. Katharine, after her first profession of vows
at the Sisters of Mercy convent in Pittsburgh (1891) (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 17. Mother Mary Katharine Drexel, after her final profession of
vows (1895) (Archives of the Sisters of
the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 18. St. Michel, the Drexel family summer home, became the temporary motherhouse for the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. The Drexel home is in
the center, above the added church and novitiate. (Archives of the Sisters