The Eye of the Needle
Katharine Mary Drexel dedicated her life and inheritance to the needs of Native Americans and Blacks in the West and Southwest United States and established a religious order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. She financed more than 60 missions and schools around the United States. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II and is the second American-born saint.
My mother put on her white gloves and her blue hat with the large brim and the artificial pink rose pinned to the side. I was attired in my good plaid jacket and bow tie and, to my embarrassment, the Alpine hat that marked this as a dress-up occasion. We were going to John Wanamaker’s Department Store to buy my Easter outfit, and in 1955 no respectable person who lived in the working-class warrens of South Philadelphia would venture into Center City in less than his Sunday best.
I always felt a stranger in a strange land when we went to Center City. Its tall buildings and ceaseless bustle and the air of being on important business that emanated from the men who walked briskly along the sidewalks with briefcases and fedoras and straight-ahead incurious looks all struck me as foreign. I was used to the look of men in overalls and work clothes stepping off the trolley and walking slowly, somewhat wearily, either toward their houses or the consolations of Rafferty’s Bar. And the only building that raised its head above the modest level of the two-story row homes was the parish church.
Center City to me meant rich people, and rich people were not my people. They were not Catholic. But as I rode beside my mother on the Broad Street bus that late winter’s day, there was someone the newspapers were fond of describing as “the richest nun in the world” living out the final hours of a remarkable life that would eventually cause her to be raised to the altar. Catherine Drexel, then Mother Katharine of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, was 97 years old and being cared for by her daughters in religion at the convent she had founded in Cornwell Heights, a suburb of Philadelphia now known as Bensalem. That day, our purchases took us past 15th and Walnut streets, the site of the former home of Francis Anthony Drexel, where Catherine had passed much of her childhood.
Philadelphians knew about the Drexels. Their family name was attached to many buildings and places, from the Drexel Institute of Technology to Drexel Hill. And we knew, in a vague way, that one of the Drexel daughters had become a nun and used her vast fortune to help educate American Indian and black children. But even the bonds of religion and the esteem for sanctity could not overcome that sense of separation that exists between rich and poor. Catherine had been rich. And so we revered her, not as one of us, but as belonging to another class who lived in a way that we could barely imagine. She was from Center City.
Wealth and sanctity, almost natural opposites, share one quality: most of us tend to see both from the outside looking in. We know a little about wealth, because we have all had a bit of extra money from time to time, and we know something of sanctity, for we have had moments of grace when we were aware of a greater power working in us. But as habitual possessions, wealth and sanctity are uncommon. And how improbable that the two should be joined in one person. But so it happened with Mother Katharine.
She died that second week of Lent when I was almost six years old, and the newspapers duly reviewed her life and good works, toted up her family’s fortune and her enormous share of it, and gave their approbation to the use she made of her inheritance. She was dubbed a philanthropist, which is as close as the secular world comes to defining sanctity. Poor people marveled at her selflessness in giving away all her money, perhaps with the thought that they would not have done the same; that it would have been sensible and proper to keep some of it. What most struck my young mind was how old she was: 97. It seemed incredible to me that someone born before the Civil War should have lived into my lifetime.
It still impresses me. Born in Philadelphia in 1858, Catherine was the second of Francis Drexel’s three daughters. Her mother, Hannah Langstroth, died five weeks after Catherine was born. Two years later, her father remarried. Emma Bouvier was the only mother Catherine knew, and she loved her. Emma soon gave birth to a third daughter, Louise. No distinction was made, no favoritism shown by Emma. All were her daughters. She was a woman of deep faith and great charity. The Drexel house at 1503 Walnut Street was not only known to the financiers who were entertained in its dining room, but to the poor who were fed from its kitchen. Francis Drexel also devoted much of his wealth to helping the less fortunate, as did other members of the family that owned banking houses in Philadelphia, New York, and Paris.
Catherine’s family divided its time between Center City and an estate in Torresdale called St. Michel, where Catherine later taught the local children catechism at a Sunday School the Drexels had established. Archbishop Wood, who succeeded St. John Neumann as bishop of Philadelphia, visited St. Michel and said Mass there.
Catherine’s early life, from all external evidence, was a happy one, unmarred by want or illness or the large and little tragedies that come to many of us. Of her spiritual life, one can only speculate. She had a great love for St. Francis of Assisi, a fellow child of privilege who was to renounce his inheritance and embrace Lady Poverty. And she was devoted to her patron saint, Catherine of Siena, a merchant’s daughter who chose a life of celibacy and good works over one of bourgeois comforts. We know that Catherine dreamed of entering the religious life. Although introduced into society in the grand manner at a Center City ball in 1878, she never showed any interest in the usual occupations of rich young ladies. Fashion, parties, and young men did not attract her. She was devoted to her parents, her sisters, and her faith.
The Drexels traveled a good deal. They toured Europe and had private audiences with Pope Pius IX and Pope Leo XIII. Once, when in Rome awaiting such an audience, the Drexels made the acquaintance of a missionary priest who worked among the American Indians of the Northwest. His stories of the sufferings of the people he labored among moved Catherine profoundly. She found herself becoming preoccupied with the plight of these forgotten tribes, a preoccupation that eventually led to a trip West to visit the missions.
The Drexels traveled the West in style, not because of any preference on Catherine’s part but because Francis Drexel was considering investing in the Great Northern Railroad. Because of this, its president, J.J. Hill, provided his personal car and a locomotive to take the Drexels wherever they wanted to go. Catherine wanted to go see the Indians described by the missionary they had met in Rome.
She was never to forget the scenes of desolation she witnessed in that territory now known as the state of Washington. The poverty of the makeshift villages was extreme. She was overwhelmed by the physical and spiritual needs of people to whom the world seemed to turn a blind eye. Her spiritual director, Father James O’Connor, had been made bishop of Omaha, then a vast territory that also included Indian missions that Catherine visited. She determined to do something to help. She had money at her disposal, but alms giving was not enough for her. She wanted to give herself, not just her money.
But every time she approached Bishop O’Connor on the question of her vocation, he advised her to wait and pray. Catherine first wanted to enter a cloister, but the quiet life of prayer was something she would know only toward the end of her days. She was certain that her life was to be given to God, that she was called to His work in some way, but she patiently trusted in her spiritual advisor and waited for God to show her His will in His own time.
As the years of her youth rolled by, those ties which kept her bound to the Drexel household were loosened. First, her stepmother, Emma Bouvier Drexel, died of cancer in 1881. Catherine nursed her during the final months of her illness. After Emma’s death, Catherine became even closer to her father, trying to console him in his loneliness.
Francis Drexel was a man of business, but he was also a man of prayer. It was known in the household that he was not to be disturbed during the first hour after his return from the office. It was assumed he was resting during that time, but a maid later told Catherine that she had inadvertently walked in on him once and found him on his knees, so deep in prayer that he did not notice her intrusion. He also liked to play the organ, and it was the sound of this instrument that announced to his family that he had emerged from his daily seclusion. But in the years following his wife’s death, his characteristic vigor and energy waned.
In 1885, Francis Drexel died. Catherine grieved deeply for her father and her own health took a turn for the worse. The family physician recommended she visit the mineral springs at a resort in Germany. Catherine agreed to the trip to Europe, but for reasons other than her health. She had long wanted to visit Assisi.
A few years earlier, on a trip with her father, she had entered the church of San Marco in Venice to pray before the mural of the Madonna. In what her biographers describe as a vision, Catherine saw the Madonna become animated and heard a voice say to her: “Freely you have received; freely give.” This was the motto of the Franciscans, adopted as the principle of their rule by the Little Poor Man who founded the order. Previous attempts to visit Assisi had been thwarted for one reason and another, but now, Catherine was determined.
Her health did improve and she at long last found herself kneeling in the Portiuncula, the place where Francis received his command from God to rebuild His Church. Again the phrase, “Freely you have received; freely give” resonated in Catherine’s thoughts, but as yet, without a definite plan of action.
She and her sisters visited Rome in 1887 and applied for an audience with the pope. Leo XIII received the Drexels, and Catherine, to her own and everyone else’s amazement, found herself emboldened to address the pope on the need for missionaries to the American Indians. The Holy Father looked at the future saint and said simply, “Why don’t you become a missionary?”
Catherine had received her vocation from the Vicar of Christ.
Upon returning to America, Catherine, with Bishop O’Connor’s approval, arranged to become a postulant at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh, with the understanding that she would be given permission to found her own order after her profession of vows. This occurred in 1891 and, with 13 followers, Catherine Drexel became Mother Katharine of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
Her sisters Louise and Elizabeth both married, although Elizabeth was to die in childbirth a short time later. Her death greatly increased the size of Mother Katharine’s trust fund, which earned about $1,000 per day. Mother Katharine herself, vowed to poverty, lived simply, while her inheritance was used to fund the work of her religious order. And that work was considerable.
Initially, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament were devoted to working among the American Indians, many of whom had not yet had the Gospel preached to them. The sisters combined the spiritual and corporal works of mercy as they established schools and hospitals and houses of religion. But Mother Katharine soon realized that there was another group of neglected and needy people in her native land.
In the decades following the Civil War, blacks had poured into the cities in great numbers, where they lived in great poverty. Those that remained in the rural districts fared no better. Slavery had been abolished, but blacks were still segregated and opportunities for education and advancement either severely limited or non-existent. That is, until Mother Katharine turned her attention to the problem.
Although she now enjoys a certain vogue in this era of victim-class politics in which minorities often receive preferential treatment and the charge of racism can end a public career, it is important to remember that Mother Katharine took it upon herself to found schools for black children at a time when such action was a scandal to many whites. Opposition to her work was more or less constant. She often had to use proxies to purchase property, for if it were learned that a building or piece of land was to be used by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, community pressure might be applied to block the sale.
In one instance, dynamite was planted in the foundation of the motherhouse the order was erecting, but it was discovered in time. Much of her work among blacks was carried on in the South, where Catholics were not much appreciated, and Catholics working to educate blacks were positively demonized. But Mother Katharine and her sisters were undeterred, and one by one, the buildings went up, the schools flourished, converts were made and the order grew.
In the North, the Blessed Sacrament nuns taught in poor urban districts. Once, during my career as a newspaper editor, I noticed a black reporter whose grammar was unusually good. I assumed he was self-taught, for I knew the public high school he had attended in Philadelphia would have afforded him little opportunity to learn much of anything. We got to talking about it once and he told me, “I went to a grade school in West Philly set up by Katharine Drexel. Those sisters had me diagram a lot of sentences.”
During her lifetime, Mother Katharine founded more than 60 schools and missions, including Xavier University, established in New Orleans in 1925. At the time of her death in 1955, her small band of 13 sisters had grown to 501, with 49 houses in 21 states. Yet, very little fanfare accompanied the order’s work. “It’s best to do things quietly,” was a phrase often repeated by Mother Katharine when engaged in a project.
In 1936, Mother Katharine suffered a heart attack. A year later, at the age of 79, she retired as superior of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. She was to live a long time afterward, during which she seemed to be offered the vocation to which she was first drawn: that of a contemplative. She passed her last 18 years in a quiet life of prayer and relative seclusion at the order’s motherhouse near Philadelphia. Considered a living saint by many, her cause was not long in being introduced. She was beatified in 1988 and canonized in 2000 by Pope John Paul II and declared the patron saint of social justice.
Of course, the phrase “social justice” probably wouldn’t mean the same thing to Mother Katherine as it did to Pope John Paul II. It certainly was not used as the cant term it has become since Vatican II. It is also difficult to say whether her cause for sainthood was accelerated by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the advent of so-called Liberation Theology with its “preferential option for the poor.” That latter phrase would likely have puzzled her as well as offended her sense of proper diction: are not all options a matter of preference?
She understood honesty and justice and charity, but not as divorced from the traditional Catholic Faith. She was, first and foremost, a nun, not a social worker, which is why it is incorrect to call her a philanthropist. Philanthropy is often a hobby of rich women who devote some time to raising money for hospitals and museums through fashionable dinners and wine-tasting parties and other events attended by the most exclusive society. Young Catherine had that option, which might be called the “preferential option of the rich,” but she declined it.
Instead, she chose to become a nun. She renounced philanthropy for charity, that is, caritas, in its highest sense: the love of God, and all other things through, with and in God. There is an unfortunate tendency to reverse the order of that reality that defined Mother Katharine’s life and to make “social justice” and not God the motive force of her actions. Such a tendency would group Mother Katharine with such secular “saints” as Martin Luther King Jr., noted for his concern for social justice, as well as his penchant for adultery, plagiarism and his position as minister in a heretical sect.
It is Mother Katharine’s fate to have been raised to the altar at a time when many prominent Churchmen have succumbed to naturalism. And the altar to which she has been raised is most often a table on which is enacted a ritual that she would not recognize.
It is the fate of every historical figure to be misconstrued by later generations whose changing concerns are often a bar to their proper understanding of who and what preceded them. But the distance in time is less formidable a bar to understanding than is a break in culture. The break between the pre- and post-Vatican II Church is radical. It is as though an earthquake has divided the land of the faith, and members of what is nominally the same Church now stand on either side of a great divide and stare at one another uncomprehendingly.
Mother Katharine came of age during the papacy of Pope Pius IX. She looked into the eyes of Leo XIII. She was commended by St. Pius X. Then, almost a half-century after her death and a century and a half after her birth and in the midst of the worst crisis in faith since the Arian heresy, she is declared the patron saint of social justice by John Paul II.
She enjoys the approbation of the post-Vatican II Church because its adherents see her as a precursor of their own “enlightened” faith, with its preoccupation with the categories of political correctness. It is as though her being a nun were incidental to her being a supposed promoter of equality. It is almost as though she is forgiven for being a nun in light of her actions on behalf of the black community.
This tendency to place Mother Katharine in a time machine, so to speak, and to make her a post-Vatican II progressive not only distorts her true image but makes her saintliness suspect to those very people who still possess the same faith that she lived by.
The most popular of her biographies was written by a black journalist named Ellen Tarry, a 1923 graduate of St. Francis De Sales High School in Rock Castle, Va., a school founded by Mother Katharine which, like many such institutions, has since closed its doors. The book was first published two years after Mother Kathatine’s death and re-issued in 2000, the year of her canonization. The latter edition contains a preface by the late John Cardinal O’Connor, then archbishop of New York and an important figure in the post-Vatican II Church in America. He says that Mother Katharine was his heroine. Most boys have heroes, rather than heroines, and one suspects that his late Eminence may have been trying to establish his bona fides as a lifelong holder of politically correct sympathies. The cardinal goes on to say that reading the book “brought me close to tears.”
Tarry’s book, however, may be judged by criteria other than its effect on O’Connor. That Tarry had a profound esteem for Mother Katharine cannot be doubted. She received her diploma from Mother Katharine’s hands, which makes it something of a relic. But esteem alone does not make a biography what it should be: an insight into the soul of the subject.
Tarry was helped in her research by the sisters at St. Elizabeth’s Convent, the motherhouse in Bensalem, who also gave her permission to “create dialogue, and to enrich certain scenes with details.” I consider such permission to have been a mistake.
Creating dialogue is an exercise that should be avoided in biography and only done with great circumspection in historical fiction. Character is revealed through dialogue, and to “create dialogue” is very near to creating character. It presumes an intimate knowledge of the subject, down to his probable choice of grammar and diction and tone. I would be hesitant to “create dialogue” for people I have known all my life, for everyone is capable of acting, and speaking, out of character; which is a way of saying that we can never completely know another’s character, nor even our own, for that matter. Others surprise us, and we sometimes surprise ourselves.
And there is this to consider: dialogue can conceal as well as reveal, and poorly written dialogue obscures the personality it is meant to bring into focus. Tarry’s dialogue creates an air of unreality. One cannot see people speaking the words she puts into their mouths. Her portrait of Johanna Ryan, the Drexels’ Irish housekeeper, verges on caricature. And what’s more: Tarry goes beyond creating dialogue and sometimes describes thought processes and emotions. Overall, her approach is far too intrusive and yet fails to give us a true sense of character. The book may have moved John Cardinal O’Connor, and perhaps it moved others, but it left me unsatisfied. I finished reading it and still felt I had yet to meet Catherine Drexel.
How did this wealthy heiress from Center City become a saint? Our Lord said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Catherine Drexel did that which is nearly impossible: she had passed through the eye of the needle. Who was she?
Then it struck me that of all the names she might have chosen for the congregation she founded, she chose to call it the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Here is a key, perhaps the key, to understanding her.
She once said that love does not consist in sweetness of devotion, but in striving to do God’s will. As a young woman, she wanted that sweetness of devotion; she wanted to be a contemplative. But she had inherited a fortune and her father’s managerial abilities and there was a great missionary work waiting for her, ordained for her. So she bent herself to her God-given task. But her life was an illustration of the truth that contemplation and action go together, the first leading to the second and the second back to the first, until the soul reaches such a unity through love that one becomes the other. Our Lord said that in Him we will find pasture, and go in and out.
All through her life, Catherine was devoted to Eucharistic adoration. The patron saint of social justice loved to be in one place above all others: before the tabernacle. Her failing health during the last decades of her life caused her to withdraw from active management of the order she had so firmly established. She was, it seemed, finally permitted to become the contemplative she had once longed to be. In dialogue that is not created, but recorded in her own words, Mother Katharine said:
My sweetest joy is to be in the presence of Jesus in the holy Sacrament. I beg that when obliged to withdraw in body, I may leave my heart before the Blessed Sacrament. When after benediction, the priest locks the sacred Host in the tabernacle, I beg Jesus to lock me into the tabernacle until morning.
Now, she is locked there for eternity. Perhaps it might have been more fitting to make her the patron saint of Eucharistic adoration.
Her order, which had more than 500 members when she died in 1955, now has about 150, according the archivist at the motherhouse, where 77 members– more than half the order–reside. No information was available on how many of the sisters are retired and how many remain active, although it is safe to assume that, as in other religious congregations, a good many of the sisters are elderly. There is presently one “candidate,” which is the preferred designation for what used to be known as a novice, and vocations trickle in at the rate of about one per year. The focus of the order has shifted primarily from teaching to “pastoral ministry,” a broad and elastic category, and many of its schools have either closed or been turned over to others. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, like the other religious orders in the post-Vatican II Church, are enjoying the “new springtime” of the conciliar reforms: The order is dying.
All of the structures that are raised in this world are, of course, provisional. Whether for good or evil, every institution has its day of influence and then begins that often slow process of decay until it is interred in the vault of history. The Church endures, but Her religious orders can be creatures of time, subject to waxing and waning, yet they are not to be measured in the same manner as secular organizations, for their purpose is transcendent.
The success of Mother Katharine’s work ought not to be gauged by the material improvements it effected in the lives of those served by her missions and schools; nor should the gradual dissolution of her order be seen as an ultimate failure of her purpose.
For her purpose was to save souls.
How well she succeeded is something we cannot know, but we can know this: that anyone who manages to save one soul has done a great thing. Buildings are raised and crumble into dust, governments come and go, and even popes rest but briefly on the throne of Peter. What does endure is the work of salvation.
St. Katharine Drexel, sister of the Blessed Sacrament, mother of enduring goodness, pray for us.
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