She was born into an extremely wealthy Philadelphia family in 1858. Her father, Francis, was a Catholic. Her mother, Hannah Langsroth Drexel, a Baptist Quaker, died soon after giving birth to Katharine. Two years later, her father married a Catholic, Emma Bouvier. In 1887, in a private audience with Pope Leo XIII, Katharine pleaded for priests to serve the American Indians. His fateful reply was that she, herself, should become that missionary. At the end of 1888, at the age of thirty, she received permission from her spiritual director to become a religious and joined the Sisters of Mercy for her training. In 1891, she founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Negroes. (Intending to extend the focus of her order, she later changed the word “Negroes” to “Colored People.”) In 1935, when she was seventy-seven years old, St. Katharine suffered a severe heart attack and until her death in 1955 lived in prayerful retirement. By the time of her death, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament numbered more than five hundred sisters, with 51 convents from which were conducted 49 elementary schools, 12 high schools, Xavier University in New Orleans, 3 houses of social service and a house of studies in Washington, D.C. Her cause was opened in 1964 and in 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized her.
Read more about her here: Katharine Drexel: A Saint for Modern Americans
Mural in the rear nave lunette of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, Washington, D.C. The mural depicts (right to left): Frances Mary Saul, Sr. Benedicta Fenwick, B. Francis Saul, General Simón Bolívar, St. Philippine Duchesne, St. Rose of Lima, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Isaac Jogues, Archbishop Michael Curley, William Matthews, Cardinal James Gibbons with two servers (William Sands and Patrick Hannan), Monsignor Thomas Lee, Archbishop John Carroll, Bishop John Neumann, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, St. Katharine Drexel, General Charles Ewing, Dame Margaret Brent, and Mother Angelica Holton. Image (cropped) credit: Almonroth, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
