Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  In raising Edith Stein to the altar, Pope John Paul II made both a religious and a political statement. He indicated that in remembering St. Teresa Benedicta, one honors a saint who gave her life willingly for her people and one recalls the horror of the Holocaust and all the lesser lies perpetrated by mankind in service to evil or misguided ends. In following her example, people are called to seek the truth, and as she wrote, “Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously.”109

  Politics have often been a factor in deciding who is and who is not a saint. From the Baroque era onward, the process itself became time consuming and expensive. As times have changed, so have the saints recognized in the times changed. According to Stephen Wilson,

  Those who have examined the sociology of saints are agreed that they reflect the structure of the societies which produce and honor them. This is true of the medieval saints, of the canonized saints of the West, of the saints of Byzantium and of Russia; and two features stand out. First, saints are of overwhelmingly aristocratic or upper-class origin, and hagiographers place great emphasis on this, if only by pointing to their subject’s renunciation of the privileges of high status. . . . Secondly, saints are also overwhelmingly male. The “canon” of Russian saints includes fewer than a dozen women, while among saints canonized in the West, the proportion of women, as Delooz demonstrates, never rose above 20 percent until [the twentieth century] and was often considerably below this. . . . A further feature is also revealing. In the Western Church . . . female saints are nearly always virgins and not married women with children.110

  Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell recognized that while hagiographers and historians may pay a great deal of attention to a saint’s aristocratic rank or high status, the common people tend to view saints as classless: “Except at the two extremes of the social scale, kings and peasants, whose class was usually germane to the perception of their holy lives, saints, especially if they had taken monastic or clerical vows, tended to be seen as classless — which is to say that the perception of their saintly activities did not give prominence to whether they bore a title or came from a good family.”111 It matters not that rank-and-file believers view saints as classless, for that is after the fact of canonization. In the making of saints, those whose backers have influence, sufficient resources, and time are the most successful. Thus, there are indeed many kings, queens, and aristocrats among the canon of saints. If a candidate for sainthood is a female, if she cannot be a queen, it is best that she be a nun; and more specifically, it is best if she is the founder of an order. There are many founders of religious orders on the roll of the saints. Religious orders have the motivation to see their founders canonized; they have the resources to sustain the project through; and they have long institutional memories. When the Second Vatican Council recommended that religious orders remain close to the charisms of their founders, many orders began to file petitions for the canonization of founders.112 The cause for the canonization of Katharine Drexel began in 1964. On the day she was canonized, she shared the ceremony with St. Maria Josefa of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Sancho de Guerra, the founder of the Servants of Jesus. Father Redemptus Valabek of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints is quoted by Woodward as saying, “Once one group of nuns decides to get their foundress beatified, they all want their foundresses beatified.”113

  The Saints of Pope John Paul II

  The approach of John Paul II toward saint-making appears to have been pastoral and evangelical. Even though the Second Vatican Council made a universal call to holiness, it recognized that holiness is not a singular quality. There are at least as many paths to holiness as there are saints, for each saint, indeed each individual, is unique. Each saint responds to God’s grace within the confluence of his or her time and place. Saints provide Christians with unending sources of inspiration for lives lived in holiness. Indeed, the cult of saints is so pervasive in the Catholic Church that every church altar contains the relics of a saint. An altar is defined by canon law as “a tomb containing the relics of a saint.” And where his relics are, the saint is said to be present. The tomb of St. Martin of Tours has an inscription that reads,

  Here lies Martin the bishop, of Holy memory,

  Whose soul is in the hands of God, but he is fully here,

  Present and made plain in miracles of every kind.114

  The process for making saints was so long and involved that there was a backlog of more than one thousand when John Paul II became pope. As the pilgrim pope who traveled the world over, he loved to present new blesseds or saints to the countries he visited. Pope Paul VI had divided the Congregation for Rites into two congregations, one being the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. On January 25, 1983, John Paul II officially changed the canonization process by his Apostolic Constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister. His goal was to make the process “simpler . . . while maintaining the soundness of the investigation in matters of such great import.” In effect, the process became more streamlined, less cumbersome, faster, and cheaper. The new regulations do away with the adversarial model that had been the norm for four hundred years. No longer is there a Devil’s Advocate who attempts to defeat a particular cause for sainthood. Under the new rules, there are still tribunals where eyewitness testimony is taken, but instead of dealing with unending court briefs written by lawyers, the Congregation now relies mainly on accounts by relators that “respond more adequately to the dictates of historical criticism.”115 Local bishops assume the responsibility of collecting proof of holiness, or heroic virtue, as well as assembling all the writings of the proposed saint. The material is sent to Rome where the writings still require a nihil obstat, and the locally gathered testimony is turned over to a relator, who may or may not be trained in historical-critical methodology, but who writes a positio outlining the life and virtues of the individual. With the writing of the positio, the relator’s job is complete. The relator for Katharine Drexel was Fr. P. Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit and university historian; Joseph Martino, former bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was the vice relator, who actually wrote the biographical section of the positio. The postulator was the Italian Jesuit Fr. Paul Molinari.

  The postulator’s task is to see the cause for sainthood through to its completion. He or she turns the completed positio over to a panel of eight theologians. If six of the eight approve of the candidate, the cause is passed on to the Congregation’s board of cardinals and bishops for their judgment. Miracles are judged, as before, by panels of medical doctors and theologians, though the number of miracles required has been halved. One miracle is required for beatification of a nonmartyr (martyrs need no miracles for beatification), and an additional miracle is required for canonization. The pope has final approval of who becomes a blessed or a saint. To create more blesseds, Pope John Paul II was known to dispense with proven miracles, as he did for Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, a Native American of the Mohawk tribe who died in 1680, and Blessed Rupert Mayer, a German Jesuit priest who died in 1945.

  The pope believed that God talks to his people in and through the saints, and that the saints present the face of God. As the chief pastor of a church of over one billion people, the pope’s task is to lead the Church’s mission of holiness. The saints and blesseds are the manifestation of the success of that mission. The saints are looked upon as friends of God and friends of mankind. It is God who makes saints; the Church simply holds them up for all to see.

  They are valuable examples for the Church: Blesseds and Saints show us practical ways to holiness. Their lives are lives of witnessing to Christ. Today they are held up to the people of the new evangelization and to the people of our times. The Church presents the riches of the patrimony of their holiness and witness to new generations and the times to come and this heritage serves as a reference point in their human and Christian formation. In the life of the Church [saints] also serve as a contribution to the mission of evangelizing the world
. Since they constitute a heritage, the Saints are also a programme, that is, they show us what we need to do. They are an example for us to follow of how, or in what way, we should fulfill our commitment to being human and Christian.116

  The pope wrote in his encyclical Novo Millennio Ineunte, that in the saints one sees “holiness, a message that convinces without the need of words . . . the living reflection of the face of Christ.”117 Here he reiterated the line in Lumen Gentium, “God shows to men, in a vivid way, his presence and his face in the lives of those companions of ours in the human condition who are most perfectly transformed into the image of Christ. He speaks to us in them, and offers us a sign of his kingdom, to which we are so powerfully attracted, so great a cloud of witnesses is there given.”118

  Early in his pontificate, John Paul II asked the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to bring him candidates from around the world who represented all walks of life. Martyrdom is still the most direct route to sainthood. Of the 482 saints he canonized, 411 were martyred. Of the 1,338 blesseds beatified by the pope, 1,030 were martyred. The next surest path to sainthood is still found in the consecrated life. However, the pope tried to raise the number of the laity represented in the canons of saints and blesseds, and he recognized more than 500 of them. One example is Blessed Pierre Toussaint, the New York barber-philanthropist who was born into Haitian slavery.

  To those who complained that the Vatican had become a “saint factory,” the pope responded directly: “It is sometimes said that there are too many beatifications today. However, in reflecting reality, which by God’s grace is what it is, it also responds to the desire expressed by the [Vatican] Council [II]. The Gospel is so wide spread in the world and its message has sunk such deep roots that the great number of beatifications vividly reflects the action of the Holy Spirit and the vitality flowing from Him in the Church’s most essential sphere, that of holiness. Indeed, it was the Council that put particular emphasis on the universal call to holiness.”119

  The increased number of saints and blesseds shows the vitality of the Church and reflects also the huge size and diversity of the universal church. Pope John Paul II emphasized that “the greatest homage which all the Churches can give to Christ on the threshold of the third millennium will be to manifest the Redeemer’s all-powerful presence through the fruits of faith, hope, and charity, present in men and women of many different tongues and races who have followed Christ in the various forms of Christian vocation.”120 The greatest historical figures for the Church are not kings, conquerors, or popes, but the saints, for they hold the keys to holiness. “The main task of the Church is to lead Christians along the path of holiness. . . . The Church is the ‘home of holiness,’ and the Charity of Christ, poured out by the Holy Spirit, is her soul.”121 As long as he was pope, John Paul II continued to raise to the altar new blesseds and new saints for the faithful. For “the saints [are] . . . unique figures in whom is found not a theory nor even merely a moral, but a plan of life to be recounted, to be discovered through study, to be loved with devotion, to be put into practice with imitation.”122

  While Pope John Paul II beatified and canonized more holy men and women than his predecessors, and more from wider walks of life, the majority of the canonizations he presided over were male clerics. Of the women he canonized, most were religious nuns and sisters. Additionally, the majority of all his canonizations were Europeans. These statistics ought not to detract from the fact that John Paul II went out of his way to beatify and canonize candidates from Africa, Asia, and the Americas and to increase the number of women and laity among the saints. In part, the statistics speak to how little control a pope has over the canonization processes, and in part they testify to how difficult it is to break traditional modes of thought. Even though the pope makes the last decision of approval, with the initiation for sainthood in the hands of local bishops, ultimately the bishops say who does and does not become a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. However, it is the papal pronouncement that makes it ecclesiastically certain that the named saint is in heaven. As part of his teaching office, the pope proclaims: “We solemnly decide and define that [name] is a saint and inscribe him [or her] in the catalog of saints, stating that his memory shall be kept with pious devotion by the universal Church.” This is a solemn pronouncement and carries the weight of the authority of the pope’s teaching office.

  The Cause for the Sainthood of Katharine Drexel

  As a founder of an order of nuns, St. Katharine Drexel was a very traditional candidate for canonization. That she was from the United States made her somewhat unusual. What is remarkable about her canonization process is that hers was the first positio written in English, and hers was the first petition for sainthood to go through the process as reformed by Pope John Paul II in 1983. That her cause was actually initiated in 1964 and not taken up until 1983 indicates how complex and lengthy was the old juridical process. Under the new process, she was beatified in 1988 and canonized on October 1, 2000. The length of time between her beatification and her canonization was due to the need to authenticate a second miraculous cure. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament received thousands of letters from people claiming miracles wrought by the intervention and intercession of Katharine Drexel. One miracle was needed for her beatification and a second one for her canonization. The first authenticated miraculous cure was of Robert Guntherman, who, at the age of fourteen, in 1974, was hospitalized with a very high fever and serious ear infection. It was a life-threatening illness that left him completely deaf in one ear. His inner ear bones were surgically scraped to no effect. He remained deaf. One of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament suggested that his family pray directly and exclusively to Katharine Drexel. The ear bones were regenerated and Robert’s hearing was restored. The Philadelphia doctors could not explain his complete and sudden cure. In 1987, the Vatican medical review board found that Robert’s cure was medically inexplicable; thus it was miraculous. In 1988, a board of theologians found that the miracle was due to the intervention of Katharine Drexel. Seven months later Katharine Drexel became the Blessed Katharine Drexel.

  A second miracle was sought by the supporters of her cause. Hundreds of incidents were investigated, but none proved to be, in fact, miraculous. Finally, little Amanda Wall, a seventeen-month-old toddler who was born deaf, suddenly began to hear after her family prayed to Blessed Katharine Drexel. Again, the Philadelphia doctors could find no natural cause for the sudden onset of Amanda’s hearing. It took two years for the case to be heard by the Vatican’s medical examiners. In 1999, the medical review board proclaimed that Amanda Wall’s sudden ability to hear had no known medical explanation. It was a miracle. In January 2000, the board of theologians ascribed the miracle to the direct intervention of Katharine Drexel. The way was cleared for her canonization. The father of Amanda Wall was a non-Catholic; he was a nondenominational Protestant who converted to Catholicism after his daughter’s miracle. He explained what he saw as the reason behind the two hearing miracles attributed to Katharine Drexel’s intercession: “I think this is her way of telling us we should listen to the Word of God.”123 That explanation may be as good as any other in explaining what the miracles mean, but just what did Pope John Paul II intend when he canonized St. Katharine Drexel?

  If canonization is part of a pope’s teaching office, what lessons should be learned from St. Katharine Drexel and her life of holiness? At the mass for her canonization, the pope said:

  “See what you have stored up for yourselves against the last days!” (James 5:3). In the second reading of today’s liturgy, the Apostle James rebukes the rich who trust in their wealth and treat the poor unjustly. Mother Katharine Drexel was born into wealth in Philadelphia in the United States. But from her parents she learned that her family’s possessions were not for them alone, but were meant to be shared with the less fortunate. As a young woman, she was deeply distressed by the poverty and hopeless conditions endured by many Native-A
mericans and Afro-Americans. She began to devote her fortune to missionary and educational work among the poorest members of society. Later, she understood that more was needed. With great courage and confidence in God’s grace, she chose to give not just her fortune but her whole life totally to the Lord.124

  The pope was upholding her holy poverty as an example for others to follow.

  As stated earlier, the pope was interested in concrete individuals. While saints are saints for the universal church, John Paul II was careful to raise to the altar specific saints for specific peoples and regions of the world. In St. Katharine Drexel, he was designating a specific saint who had virtues that deserved to be imitated by a specific people, the Catholics living in the United States; but he was also holding her up as a Catholic exemplar for American non-Catholics. To see what he intended with this particular saint, it is necessary to return to what the pope saw as the negative signs of the times. One of his ongoing emphases was the devastating effects of atheistic materialism and a culture that privileges “having” over “being.” He was concerned with both the exploited and the exploiter in such a culture. The United States of America qualifies as one of the pope’s so-called superdeveloped countries. In the hedonistic pursuit of happiness that creates vast wealth for some at the degradation and exploitation of others, having more has often meant that others have less, and those with little means are judged as inferior. Everyone is a true loser in such a system. All are degraded and alienated from their true selves as children of God. To share with Katharine Drexel in the communion of saints is to have as a close companion one who gave up wealth, social power, and position to make a holy gift of herself in service to others. “Having” was not important to Katharine Drexel. “Being” the face and hands of Christ in service to others was everything. Katharine’s holy poverty is a virtue to be admired and imitated in an avowed consumer society. On the day after her canonization, Pope John Paul II said of her, “St. Katharine Drexel took to heart the words of Jesus to the young man in the Gospel: ‘If you seek perfection, go and sell your possessions, and give to the poor. You will then have treasure in heaven’ ” (Matt. 19:21).125 When one has nothing else to give, one gives oneself. When one has nothing, in fact or in spirit, humility is the one virtue closely associated with holy poverty.