St. Katharine Drexel

St. Katharine Drexel was an American heiress who spent a banking fortune on schools for Native American and Black children, and then spent the rest of her life teaching in them. She was born in Philadelphia on 26 November 1858, entered religious life in 1889, founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and died at the age of ninety-six on 3 March 1955. Pope John Paul II canonised her on 1 October 2000, making her the second person born in the United States to be declared a saint.

Her life answers a question most people never have to face and everyone recognises: what do you do when you have far more than you need, in a country that is treating some of its people as less than human. Her answer was to give the money away in a form that could not be taken back, and to go and live with the people she gave it to.

1. The Challenge

Katharine was born into immense wealth in Philadelphia (her family were bankers). While visiting Rome, she asked Pope Leo XIII to send missionaries to help the Native Americans in the West. The Pope looked at her and said, "Why not become a missionary yourself?"

That exchange, in an audience during her European travels in 1887, is the account handed down in her congregation and repeated in every biography of her. She was in her late twenties, recently orphaned, and already spending large sums on missions in the American West. She is said to have left the audience in tears. Whatever the exact words, the effect is documented in what she did next.

2. Giving it All Up

She shocked society by entering the convent and giving up her fortune (estimated at $20 million in the 1890s, worth hundreds of millions today) to fund missions. She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

The mechanics matter here. Her father, Francis Anthony Drexel, left an estate valued at roughly fifteen million dollars when he died in 1885, structured so that his three daughters received the income for life while the capital was reserved to charity. Katharine could not spend the principal, and she never had to worry about running out. What she did was direct that income, year after year for six decades, into buildings, teachers' salaries and mission budgets, and take a vow of poverty herself so that she personally owned nothing.

3. A Voice for Justice

She dedicated her life and money to serving Native Americans and African Americans, two groups that were terribly marginalized. She founded Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historically Black Catholic university in the US.

She did this in the decades when segregation was being written into American law, when lynching was common and unpunished, and when a great many Catholic institutions in the United States accepted the colour line without argument. Her position was that the children she taught were entitled to the best education available, taught by qualified teachers, in buildings as good as anyone else's. She acted on that position with money for sixty-five years.

4. The Family That Formed Her

Katharine's mother, Hannah Langstroth, died weeks after her birth. Her father remarried, and Emma Bouvier Drexel raised Katharine and her sisters Elizabeth and Louise as her own. The household was rich and devout, and it had an unusual habit: several days a week the Drexel home was opened so that food, rent money, clothing and medicine could be distributed to people who came to ask. The daughters helped. They learned early that money was a thing you handed out in person to a named person standing in front of you.

Emma Drexel died of cancer in 1883 after a long illness during which Katharine nursed her. Francis Drexel died in 1885. In the space of two years the three sisters lost both parents and inherited one of the largest fortunes in the country. All three used it for charity. Elizabeth founded a trade school for orphaned boys, and Louise, with her husband, funded work among Black Catholics in Virginia. Katharine went furthest.

5. The Long Argument About Her Vocation

Katharine wanted to become a contemplative nun. Her spiritual director, Bishop James O'Connor of Omaha, spent years telling her not to. His argument was practical: a cloistered Katharine Drexel could pray, but a Katharine Drexel in the world could fund an entire missionary effort that nobody else in America was funding. Their correspondence over that question runs for years and is one of the more interesting records of spiritual direction in American Catholic history.

O'Connor eventually changed his mind, and in 1889 Katharine entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh to be trained in religious life. Philadelphia newspapers reported it as a society scandal, because a woman with that income was expected to marry, and she had received proposals. She made her first vows in 1891 and added a fourth vow to the usual three, binding herself to the service of Native American and Black people.

6. Founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament

The congregation she founded in 1891 was named the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, the language of the time. Its motherhouse, St. Elizabeth's, was built at Cornwells Heights in Bensalem Township outside Philadelphia, and the sisters were trained there before being sent out.

The two halves of the name describe the plan exactly. The sisters were an active teaching order that staffed schools in the rural South, in cities and on reservations. They were also a Eucharistic order: the Blessed Sacrament was central to the daily horarium, and the point of the adoration was the point of the schools. Katharine's stated conviction was that Christ present in the Eucharist and Christ present in the despised neighbour were the same Christ, and that a sister who knelt in front of one had to go and serve the other. Our page on the Eucharist and the Real Presence sets out what the Church teaches about the first half of that.

7. What the Money Actually Built

Over her lifetime Katharine Drexel directed roughly twenty million dollars of her income into missions, schools and the support of clergy. The figure is a commonplace in accounts of her life, and its scale in the currency of the period is hard to overstate.

The output was concrete. Her congregation founded and staffed dozens of schools, among them mission schools on reservations across the West and Southwest and elementary and high schools for Black children across the South and in northern cities. St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened in 1894 and was among the first of the major foundations. She paid teachers' salaries in parishes that could not pay them, funded seminaries that would accept Black candidates for the priesthood at a time when most would not, and quietly financed the work of other congregations doing the same thing.

She also travelled. She went to the missions herself, repeatedly, by train and by wagon, into the 1930s. She was a foundress who inspected her own buildings.

8. Xavier University of Louisiana

Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans is the institution most associated with her name. She established it in 1915, first as a secondary school, and it developed into a college and then a university over the following decade. It remains the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States, and it has long been known for the number of its graduates who go on to medical and pharmacy schools.

The reasoning behind Xavier is the reasoning behind everything she did. Elementary schools were not enough, because a child educated to the age of fourteen in a country that barred him from the professions was still barred from the professions. She built at the top of the ladder as well as the bottom, and she built a Catholic institution that would still be there when she was not.

9. The Opposition She Faced

The work was resisted, and the resistance was not abstract. Her congregation's own histories record hostility to the schools in Southern towns, difficulty buying land once sellers learned who the pupils would be, and threats from the Ku Klux Klan against a school in Texas during the Klan's revival in the 1920s. Some of the opposition came from Catholics.

Katharine Drexel's response to all of it was to keep buying land, sometimes through intermediaries, and to keep opening schools. She did not lead marches or give speeches. She was a wealthy nineteenth-century Catholic woman working inside the constraints of her time and her state in life, and within those constraints she moved an extraordinary amount of money to the people who had none, in a form the law could not easily reverse.

Scripture is direct about the offence she was answering. James tells a congregation that seats the man with gold rings in front and the poor man at their feet that they have made distinctions among themselves and become judges with evil thoughts (James 2:1 to 4). Peter, in the house of Cornelius, says that God shows no partiality (Acts 10:34). Paul writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3:28). The Catechism draws the conclusion for social life: every form of discrimination in fundamental personal rights, on grounds including race, must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God's design (CCC 1935).

10. The Last Twenty Years

In 1935 Katharine Drexel suffered a severe heart attack. She was seventy-six and had been running the congregation, the finances and the travel schedule herself. She resigned the leadership of the order and spent the last twenty years of her life largely confined to a room at the motherhouse in Bensalem.

That period is the part of her life her sisters spoke about most. The woman who had built sixty institutions spent two decades doing almost nothing except pray, mostly before the Blessed Sacrament, writing prayers in small notebooks. She died on 3 March 1955, aged ninety-six.

The two halves of her life belong together. The activity was not the whole of her, and the prayer was not a retirement from it. Our page on suffering and the Christian response to it takes up the question of what a person is doing when illness ends their usefulness.

11. Canonisation, Feast Day and Where She Rests

Pope John Paul II beatified Katharine Drexel on 20 November 1988 and canonised her on 1 October 2000. She was the second person born in the United States to be canonised, after Elizabeth Ann Seton. The miracles accepted in her cause concerned the restoration of hearing.

Her feast day is 3 March, the day of her death. She was buried at the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, and her remains were transferred in 2018 to the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, the city where she was born.

She is invoked as a patron of philanthropists and of racial justice.

12. Why the Church Holds Her Up

The Church holds up Katharine Drexel for a specific virtue, and it is not generosity in general.

Rich people have always given money away. What is unusual about her is that she gave the money to people her society had agreed to treat as less than fully human, at the moment when that agreement was at its strongest, and then went and lived among them under a vow of poverty. The gift and the giver went to the same address. That is the pattern the Gospel describes when the rich young man is told to sell what he has, give to the poor, and then come and follow (Mark 10:21). Most of the story stops at the giving. She did the second half.

The Catechism teaches that love for the poor is incompatible with immoderate love of riches or their selfish use (CCC 2445), and that the works of mercy are charity in action toward the bodily and spiritual needs of our neighbour (CCC 2447). Katharine Drexel treated education as a work of mercy, which is exactly right: a child who can read is a child who can be taught the faith, can hold a profession and cannot be as easily cheated.

13. What to Take From Katharine Drexel

Give where the giving is unpopular. Her money went to the causes that got no applause in Philadelphia society. The test she offers is uncomfortable and simple: name the people your own circle quietly treats as less important, and give there first.

Give structurally. She funded buildings, salaries and endowments, so the good outlasted her by a century. Xavier University still graduates students. A one-off donation feeds someone for a week; a scholarship or a standing monthly gift changes what is possible for years.

Keep the prayer and the work in the same person. Her order was named for the Blessed Sacrament, and the schools ran on it. Adoration, Mass and confession at a parish cost nothing and come first; our page on the Mass and what happens in it explains the centre of what she built her life around.

Expect the useful years to end. Twenty years in a sickroom followed sixty-five years of building. She treated the second period as the same vocation as the first.

14. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Katharine Drexel?

St. Katharine Drexel was an American heiress and religious sister, born in Philadelphia on 26 November 1858 and died on 3 March 1955. She inherited a share of a banking fortune, founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891, and spent roughly twenty million dollars of her income over six decades on schools and missions for Native American and Black Americans, including Xavier University of Louisiana.

How much money did Katharine Drexel give away?

Accounts of her life put the total at roughly twenty million dollars over her lifetime, in the currency of the period. Her father's estate was structured so that his daughters received the income while the capital was reserved for charity, which meant she had a very large annual income to direct and could not spend the principal. She took a vow of poverty and personally owned nothing.

What did Pope Leo XIII say to Katharine Drexel?

According to the account handed down in her congregation and repeated in her biographies, she asked the pope during an audience in 1887 to send missionaries to the Native American missions she was funding, and he replied by asking why she did not become a missionary herself. She entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Mercy two years later, in 1889.

When is St. Katharine Drexel's feast day?

Her feast day is 3 March, the day she died in 1955. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 20 November 1988 and canonised by him on 1 October 2000, becoming the second person born in the United States to be declared a saint, after Elizabeth Ann Seton.

What is St. Katharine Drexel the patron saint of?

She is invoked as a patron of philanthropists and of racial justice, both of which follow directly from her life's work. Her congregation, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, continues, and Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, which she founded in 1915, remains the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States.