Katharine Drexel

The Riches-to-Rags Life Story of an American Catholic Saint

Cheryl C. D. Hughes

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467442169
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

On October 1, 2000, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Katharine Drexel (1858–1955) to be a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Only the second American-born Catholic saint in history, Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891 and established more than sixty Blessed Sacrament missions and schools.In this biography Cheryl Hughes chronicles the remarkable life of St. Katharine Drexel, exploring what drove her to turn away from her family's wealth and become a missionary nun who served some of the most underprivileged and marginalized people of her time. Through her inspiration and effort "Mother" Katharine improved the lives of untold numbers of Native Americans and African Americans, overcoming open hostility to her work from various quarters, including the Ku Klux Klan. Her saintly legacy lives on today.

Chapter 1

Simply Katie: Katharine Drexel’s Family Life

The family has been called the first school for virtue; indeed, Pope John Paul II called the family the “first seminary,” “the domestic church,” and “the nursery of vocations.”1 Catholic Christian families teach their young what it means to be Catholic and how, practically, to live one’s life as a Christian. Katharine Drexel’s parents fostered in her and her sisters a love of virtue carried out for the benefit of others less fortunate. This chapter will demonstrate that what she learned from her parents, who through word, deed, and example set in motion the development of personal sanctity and benevolent actions that ultimately made Katharine Drexel a saint.

Katharine Drexel was not born a saint. She worked toward sanctity her entire life and, in her own estimation, fell miserably short of her goal. Her sainthood was the result of a lifelong pursuit of the perfection commanded by Jesus of his disciples. She came into this world with many of its blessings — a large, loving family and great material wealth. She was a debutante and an heiress, but these are not what one thinks about when contemplating the essence of a saint. In fact, wealth is more often than not a stumbling block to sanctity. After the encounter with the rich young man who had kept all the commandments but could not give up all his possessions to follow Jesus, Jesus remarked to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23).

Yet Katharine Drexel is recognized by the Catholic Church as a saint in that very kingdom. She became a saint not because of her wealth, but because of the spirit of poverty and stewardship with which she grew in perfection, judiciously dispensing her wealth for the specific spiritual and educational benefit of Native Americans and African Americans, the least of Jesus’ brothers in America. She lived into her ninety-­seventh year. For the last sixty-­seven of them, she was known as Mother Mary Katharine Drexel, founder of the congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, but until she was thirty she was simply Katie Drexel. The love and charity she would later channel through her religious order were extensions and amplifications of the lessons she learned from her family.

This chapter will consider Katharine’s early life within the circle of her family until that circle was broken, indeed shattered, by the death, first, of her mother and, then, of her father. It will reveal a close family that thoroughly enjoyed its wealth and social position, but will also reveal a family life tempered by the spirituality of its wife and mother, who wrote to her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, then aged eleven: “Chère Petite, Read the beautiful device above [Aidez vous et Dieu vous aidera (Help yourself and God will help you)] and resolve to try for yourself that you may have the grace of God in all your undertakings, particularly in your studies, that one day by the cultivation of your mind and the elegance of your deportment . . . you may become my jewel, my crown, my glory.”2 It became the goal of each of her three daughters to become, by the grace of God, their mother’s jewel, crown, and glory.

Family Background

Katharine Drexel was born on November 26, 1858, the second daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth Drexel, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.3 Her father was a well-­known businessman whose banking empire maintained firms in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris. He had entered the banking business at the age of thirteen as a clerk and night watchman for his father’s Drexel & Company. His father, Francis Martin Drexel, was a native of Dornbirn, Austria, born on an Easter Sunday, who left his homeland twice to escape military conscription and again later in search of commissions as a painter of portraits. Francis Martin Drexel was educated in Austria and then sent to Italy to learn painting before being apprenticed to an Austrian painter. Like many young men of his generation, he decided to try the opportunities available in the United States. He was willing to give America a six-­month trial, but he did not intend to stay indefinitely. He left Amsterdam on May 16, 1817, aboard John of Baltimore and arrived in Philadelphia on July 28. In short order, Francis Martin opened a studio at 131 South Front Street and became employed as an art instructor at Bazeley’s Female Seminary. He was immediately popular as a portrait painter and teacher. He painted three portraits in the first month he was in Philadelphia. The following year he exhibited nine oil paintings and three drawings at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. The annual exhibition of the Academy showed his work for six consecutive years.

In 1821 he married Catherine Hookey of Philadelphia, giving up on his vow to return to Austria and not make the United States his permanent home. His work as a painter and art teacher continued to prosper until he became the victim of libel and slander by Bernard Gallagher, Catherine’s brother-­in-­law.4 Francis Martin sued Gallagher, and even though Gallagher admitted his falsehoods and the case was settled out of court, the taint of a lawsuit caused the drop-­off of Drexel’s commissions among his high-­class clientele and the loss of his art students. He was released from Bazeley’s Seminary. Without other employment prospects, he was forced to leave his wife and two sons in Philadelphia to make two long trips to South America and Mexico in search of commissions.

He painted copies of portraits of Simon Bolívar and other liberators and undertook personal commissions from the socially elite. Between 1826 and 1837, Francis Martin was gone from Philadelphia for a total of six years. He earned approximately $22,000 in commissions during his South American sojourn. He sent $14,000 home to Catherine and the children; of the rest he was either robbed or refused payment, or he spent it on expenses, paints, and travel. While on his travels, he learned from the men and women with whom he had contact about the world of finance and currency. He returned to the United States on the eve of the 1837 financial panic precipitated by the end of the charter for the Bank of the United States and by President Andrew Jackson’s manipulations and decision to accept only gold or silver species for federal land transactions. Seizing what he saw as an opportunity, Francis Martin opened a small currency brokerage firm in Louisville, Kentucky, doing business in state currencies and in gold. He did well but decided that because Nicholas Biddle’s Second Bank of the United States (1816-1836) was in Philadelphia, that city was a more likely banking capital than Louisville. Accordingly, he moved his operations to Philadelphia and took his sons Francis Anthony and Anthony, then thirteen and eleven, into the business of Drexel & Company. Ten years later, Drexel & Company was in a position to lend money to the federal government for the war against Mexico. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, Francis Martin was off to San Francisco to establish the firm there, leaving his young sons in charge in Philadelphia. The boys proved to be talented and hardworking bankers who complemented one another’s style and inclination and increased the family fortunes. Drexel & Company raised large sums of money for the federal government during the Civil War (1861-1865). So important were the Drexel brothers to President Ulysses Grant, that Grant offered Katharine’s uncle Anthony Drexel a position in his cabinet as secretary of the treasury. He declined the honor, though he and the president remained friends for life. The Drexel brothers, according to historian Dan Rottenberg, maintained a straitlaced life out of the public eye, “unsullied by financial or sexual scandal, unlike, say, the lives of . . . more colorful Wall Street contemporaries Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.”5

On September 28, 1854, Francis Anthony Drexel married Hannah Jane Langstroth at the Assumption Church. The Langstroth family belonged to a sect of German Baptist pietists called Dunkards because of their practice of adult baptism, which prescribed total immersion three times during the sacrament, once for each person of the Trinity. The Dunkards stressed high moral standards, plain living, and what we would today call social justice as the road to heaven.6 Even as the wife of one of Philadelphia’s richest men, Hannah Langstroth Drexel followed the plain-­living Dunkard precepts of her girlhood. When she died, all her personal property was put into a small box, locked away in a vault at Drexel & Company, and forgotten for several decades. When the box was opened, it contained only a brooch, a jeweled barrette, a few ornamented hair combs, a gold thimble, a gold lorgnette, and a few calling cards. Hannah was the mother Katharine was never to know because she died five weeks after Katharine’s birth. However, Hannah’s mother, Elizabeth Lehman Langstroth, was a loving and influential grandmother to Katharine and her older sister, Elizabeth.

Francis Anthony Drexel met the death of his young wife with Christian stoicism. After her passing he wrote, “If I know myself I am resigned to this dispensation of the Almighty. His will in all things be done, for he ordereth all things wisely and well. He has not left me comfortless for I have been received into the Mother Church wherein is my consolation. I have every assurance that my beloved one has gone to her heavenly father.”7 Although he was born a Catholic, Drexel may have lapsed somewhat during his marriage to the Protestant Hannah, only to be received again into the Church, “wherein is my consolation,” after her death.8 Nearly two years later, he married again. His second wife was the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia Catholic family of French origin. Emma Mary Bouvier turned out to be a fortuitous choice for Francis Anthony and his two small daughters, Elizabeth and Katharine. She was...