On October 1, 2000, Katharine Drexel became a saint for the Universal Church, yet her story will always be distinctively American. The daughter of a self-made millionaire, she used her inheritance to salve the two great wounds of her country in ministering to the African American and American Indian peoples.

Katharine was born in Philadelphia on November 26, 1858, the second daughter of Francis and Hannah Drexel. By this time, the 34-year-old Francis was a nationally known banker, who with his brother Anthony had turned Drexel and Company into one of the country's leading investment firms.

It was a difficult birth, and Hannah never recovered. When she died five weeks later, Francis arranged for the infant Katharine and her three-year-old sister Elizabeth to stay with their Uncle Anthony and Aunt Ellen, who cared for them during Francis's time of mourning.

In April 1860, Francis married Emma Bouvier, and Elizabeth and Katharine joined them in their new home. Emma Drexel was a true mother to Lizzie and Katie, even after her own daughter Louise was born in 1863. Katie didn't even realize Emma wasn't her natural mother until she noticed she had more grandmothers than she had parents. Emma saw to it that Hannah's daughters paid weekly visits to their maternal grandmother, Eliza Langstroth. A Protestant, Eliza taught her granddaughters by example that Catholics were not the only Christians capable of pious and sincere faith.

The houses of American millionaires are not often thought of as incubators of sanctity. But then, the marriage of Francis and Emma Drexel was not what might be expected between a wealthy widower and a rich younger woman. They were both ardent Catholics, and they saw in their marriage an opportunity to help each other grow in faith. Emma had a small oratory built in their house, where night prayers were said as a family. "Prayer was like breathing," Katharine once said of life in the Drexel home.

While Francis preferred to pray where the servants wouldn't see him, Emma carried out a highly visible apostolate. Three times a week, she received the poor of Philadelphia at the back door of her house. She listened to the stories of hungry children, bare feet, and cold apartments, and she helped out as she could. Over time, this evolved into a systematic private charity, complete with a paid assistant.

The example of her parents had a profound effect on young Katie, who was naturally inclined to generosity and love of God. But though she was an exceptionally selfless child, she was still a child, and not above throwing the occasional public tantrum to get what she wanted. (Her mother, alas, wasn't one to be shamed into giving in to such tactics). Katie was also fond of the finer things in a girl's life. Emma had her daughters' dresses made at a nearby convent, and Katie once begged the sister who measured her to add lots of lace and ruffles. In a writing assignment from her tutor, she asked her mother, "Will you have my ears pierced soon, for I am in such a hurry to have my ears pierced? Everybody loves earrings."

In 1870, the Drexels bought and renovated a farm in the Philadelphia suburb of Torresdale. They named their country home St. Michael, and here the Drexel girls spent many happy days. Emma established a Sunday school for the children of the neighborhood, and installed Lizzie and Kate as the instructors. At one time, as many as fifty students attended, and the school remained active until 1888.

Katharine's love of God continued to deepen during her time at St. Michael. She was a frequent communicant at the chapel of a nearby convent school, and one day the students were told that she had fainted after Mass. It turned out that, on arriving at the chapel, Katherine fell from her horse and broke her collarbone. Determined to receive Communion, she said nothing of her pain until Mass was finished.

The purchase of St. Michael turned out to have another benefit no one could have predicted. In 1872, a priest named James O'Connor was appointed pastor of St. Dominic's parish, which included St. Michael. The ties he established with the Drexel family, and particularly with Katharine, were to last until his death, and as Katharine's spiritual director gave permanent shape to her vocation.

While the family's thoughts were never long away from God, it remains true that the Drexels were tremendously wealthy, and even taking into account the girls' willing self-sacrifices, there was nothing they wanted that they could not have. Private tutors, vacations at Cape May and Newport, an eight-month tour of Europe: these were the practical benefits of the Drexel brothers' success. The diary Katharine kept as an eighteen-year-old is that of a playful, intelligent young woman of the world; unlike her patron, St. Catherine of Siena, she was not at that age withdrawn into a cell the better to know and love Christ.

But she kept other journals, which she called her "accounts," in which she attempted to track her spiritual development according to the program of the well-known spiritual writer, Father Frederick William Faber. As early as 1874, when she was fifteen, her primary New Year's resolution was "To overcome Pride and Vanity," and the same year she vowed to give up butter, fruit, and between-meal snacks for Lent. More than four years later, in May 1878, she was continuing to read Father Faber, but wrote, "I have done scarcely anything to correct pride and vanity." While the pride of a saint may not be noticeable in the world, and Fr. O'Connor warned Katharine that her predominant passion was scrupulosity, her private accounts as she approached adulthood show her to be one who failed every time she attempted to perfect herself. As importantly, they also show her to be one who tried again after every failure.

There was a curious tension, as well, between being the daughter of the wealthy banker Francis Drexel and being the daughter of the reserved philanthropist Emma Drexel. Katharine was expected and encouraged to go out into society (not the very best society, of course; the Drexels were Catholic and didn't inherit their money). At the same time, she and her sisters knew that, to the extent they lived in the world, they would have to live apart from their mother. Emma was a dutiful wife and hostess, but her heart was in the work she did for the poor. Time spent socializing was time spent not serving. With such a mother, who can wonder if Katharine often felt a failure in her spiritual life, and as often felt inspired to continue to try?

Katharine finished her formal schooling in July 1878, and the following January, shortly after her twentieth birthday, she made her social debut. All that was required of her was to enjoy a life of leisure until she obtained a suitable husband and settled down. But, despite the encouragement of her parents — somewhat more restrained, perhaps, on the part of her father — Katharine passed her first few years in society without entanglement.

During this time, her mother grew increasingly ill. Emma tried to conceal her pain and weakness from the family, but when a diagnosis of cancer was announced, Katharine determined to be her constant companion. She sat by her mother's bedside and agonized over her suffering. As she nursed her mother through spasms of pain, Katharine began to seriously consider a religious vocation.

After a brave, painful struggle, Emma Drexel died on January 29, 1883. It was a loss felt as much by the poor as by those in her own social class. She had given away half a million dollars during her marriage and was paying the rent for 150 families at the time of her death.

Following Emma's death, Katharine wrote to James O'Connor, now bishop of Omaha, and told him of her growing interest in becoming a nun. Bishop O'Connor's advice was, "Think, pray, wait." The child of privilege would practice some acts of self-denial and focus on her interior life, but at this point her advisor believed she was destined to live as an example to the secular world.

In October 1883, Francis and his daughters began an extended tour of Europe, to take their minds off their grief. During this trip, Katharine followed Bishop O'Connor's advice and limited herself to an hour and a half of prayers each day. She also made a vow of virginity, binding for one year, before a much-venerated painting of the Virgin Mary in Venice. This, too, was on the advice of the bishop, although she found it contrary to her desire to settle on the religious life right away.

Shortly after the Drexel family returned to Philadelphia in May 1884, Francis announced that he had made his will in such a way as to protect his daughters from treasure hunters. The banker was quite pleased with himself, although of course his daughters were alarmed at the suggestion of his mortality.

It was a suggestion that would come to pass quite unexpectedly. While recovering from a mild case of pleurisy, Francis died suddenly on February 15, 1885. The three sisters — all in their twenties, all unmarried, all heirs to a banking fortune — were orphaned.

Francis's will caused a stir throughout the country. One tenth of his estate was to be paid out to a variety of charities. The remaining nine-tenths, $14,000,000, was to be invested, with the annual income paid out in equal shares to his daughters. Should one die without leaving children, the surviving women would then split the income. Should all three die without children, the remaining assets would be distributed among the charities named in his will.

Elizabeth, Katharine, and Louise were all determined to continue the tradition of charity their parents had handed on to them. Living together in their childhood home, they each took special interest in a different apostolate. Elizabeth followed in her father's footsteps by funding the construction of a trade school for older boys from the Philadelphia orphanages Francis had supported. Louise, meanwhile, concentrated her attention on helping poor black Americans. Katharine found herself drawn to support missions to the Indians of the American West, thanks in part to a meeting with Fr. Joseph Stephan, director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. Bishop O'Connor had recommended Fr. Stephan ask for her help in funding missions, and Katharine responded with characteristic enthusiasm and generosity.

Francis's death had hit Katharine hard. By the summer of 1886, her health deteriorated to the point where her doctor advised her to take the cure at a German health spa. She agreed, and with her sisters sailed for Europe once more.

Katharine soon recovered her health, and the Drexels began a leisurely tour of Europe. In January 1887, they obtained a private audience with Pope Leo XIII. Katharine used the opportunity to tell the Pope of the great need for missionary priests among the Indians of Wyoming. The Pope said to her, "Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?"

Katharine answered, "Because, Holy Father, sisters can be had for the missions, but no priests."

This exchange left Katharine feeling frightened and sick, and as soon as she left the Vatican she began sobbing. Her idea of a vocation, still far from settled with Bishop O'Connor, was as a contemplative. The Pope's simple suggestion had opened up a vertiginous new window on the future, and she was not yet ready to look upon all that being a missionary would demand of her.

The Drexel sisters returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1887, but by September they were traveling once more. This time, they were touring the Indian missions with Bishop O'Connor and Fr. Stephan. It was a rough trip, much of it made by horse-drawn wagon, but they knew the importance of understanding the hardships faced by the Indians and those who served them. Kate dedicated herself to building the schools that were so desperately needed, all the while struggling with the question of her own destiny.

Why was Bishop O'Connor so resistant to the idea of Kate entering a convent? There were several reasons. Kate herself had admitted she feared community life would be trying, and she wasn't sure that she could place herself under obedience to a superior whom she found stupid. For a time her health was too poor. Beyond that, some of her letters suggested that she wanted to become a nun because it was a higher calling, not because it was her own calling. Finally, as he wrote to her in May 1888, her good works "give more glory to God, and do your neighbor more good, than anything you could accomplish in a religious community."

At last, though, in November 1888, Katharine wrote to Bishop O'Connor: "Are you afraid to give me to Jesus Christ?... It appears to me, Reverend Father, that I am not obliged to submit my judgment to yours, as I have been doing for two years, for I feel so sad in doing it, because the world cannot give me peace, so restless because my heart is not rested in God."

Within days, she received his reply. "This letter of yours," he wrote, "and your bearing under the long and severe tests to which I subjected you, as well as your entire restoration to health, and the many spiritual dangers that surround you, make me withdraw all opposition to your entering religion... The only matter that, now, remains to be determined is, which order should you choose?"

As if this instantaneous reversal of five years' opposition to Katharine's religious vocation weren't a sharp enough change, less than three months later Bishop O'Connor wrote to her with a grand new vision. "The more I have thought of your case the more convinced I become that God has called you to establish an order for [the Indian and Colored people]."

This was an idea that terrified Katharine. It was now the bishop's turn to convince his spiritual daughter of the true nature of her vocation. They exchanged a flurry of letters, with Katharine raising objection after objection — she wished to be a contemplative and to receive Communion daily; she doubted her ability to provide a fitting example as founder; a new order would face various delays and oppositions that an old order would not; perhaps all the orders should help in the work. Bishop O'Connor countered each of her objections and persisted in his conviction. On March 19, 1889, she gave in, writing to him, "The Feast of St. Joseph brought me the grace...to enter fully and entirely into your views...."

The next month, Katharine and Elizabeth paid a visit to the Sisters of Mercy mother-house in Pittsburgh, where Bishop O'Connor thought Katharine could best prepare herself for religious life. (Louise was unavailable to join her sisters, since she had married Edward Morrell in January.) Katharine agreed with Bishop O'Connor's opinion of the Sisters of Mercy, and on May 7, 1889, she became a postulant in their mother-house. Here she intended to learn all she could about the religious life, until the time came for her to make her vows as the first member and superior of her own order. The lessons taught by the novice mistress, though, were far from the hardest she would learn during her time in Pittsburgh.

Bishop O'Connor fell ill a few months after Katharine entered the postulancy. Despite the best efforts of his doctors, and of Katharine herself, who helped bring him to a Pittsburgh hospital and nursed him for some weeks, he died on May 27, 1890. The man who had served and advised Katharine for half her life, the one whose vision of her life she had agreed to live, was taken from her.

Katharine was devastated. When Archbishop Patrick J. Ryan of Philadelphia visited her after Bishop O'Connor's Requiem Mass, she told him that she could not go through with the plan. He asked her, "If I share the burden with you, if I help you, can you go on?" From that day until his death in 1911, Archbishop Ryan was Katharine's constant supporter and champion.

This was not the end of her personal sorrows for 1890. Her sister Elizabeth, who married Walter George Smith at the beginning of the year, fell ill during their honeymoon in Europe. They returned to Philadelphia in early September, with Elizabeth not fully recovered but expecting a child. Later that month, she went into premature labor and died; her child was stillborn.

What passed between Katharine and her Lord as she struggled to accept these losses remained, for the most part, within her heart. In faith and hope, she survived her trials and continued to prepare for her profession of vows and the birth of her congregation.

Public announcement of her intent to found an order dedicated to caring for Indians and African-Americans had been made following her formal reception into religious life on November 7, 1889. As a novice with the Sisters of Mercy, Sister Katharine had the added duty of interviewing and accepting candidates for her own order. The candidates, who grew to thirteen in number, joined her in the novitiate in Pittsburgh.

The question of what to do with Katharine's inheritance needed to be settled. Katharine, who had been a Third Order Franciscan, wanted to give it all away and let her order embrace poverty from its foundation. In the end, though, she agreed to use her thousand dollars a day income to help establish her order, with the understanding that, following her death, it would rely on donations from the Catholic faithful.

On February 12, 1891, before Archbishop Ryan and a small group of family and friends, Katharine vowed "poverty, chastity, and obedience and to be the mother and servant of the Indians and colored people," becoming Mother Mary Katharine Drexel of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored Peoples. Soon afterwards, she and her group of novices — together with two Sisters of Mercy assigned to help them — left Pittsburgh for her family home of St. Michael, where they planned on staying until construction of the order's mother-house in what is now Bensalem, Pennsylvania, was completed.

As it turned out, they couldn't wait quite that long. The community moved into its mother-house, St. Elizabeth's Convent, on December 3, 1892, several months after construction was to have been finished but a couple of months before it actually was. This pattern, of expectations, setbacks and impatience, would become familiar to the members of the young order. They were eager to be sent to the missions; Mother Katharine had even surveyed (and helped pay for the construction of) the ideal spot for them to begin, St. Stephen's Mission in Wyoming.

Archbishop Ryan, however, was not so eager to rush the new sisters into the field. It wasn't until June 1894, that he allowed the first Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to depart the mother-house for mission work. Their destination was St. Catherine's School, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Named in honor of Mother Katharine, who had funded its construction in 1886, the school had been closed in 1893 due to lack of personnel. Nine Blessed Sacrament sisters were sent to staff the school, equaling the number of students enrolled when it opened in September 1894. More students would arrive, however, and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament operated the school until it closed in 1999.

At the same time she was sending out her first missionaries to serve Indians, Mother Katharine was looking to involve her congregation in work with African Americans. After getting support for her plans from the bishop of Richmond, she bought a 600-acre farm in Rock Castle, Virginia, adjacent to a 1,600-acre estate her sister Louise had purchased. While Louise established the St. Emma's Industrial and Agricultural Institute, a school for black boys, Mother Katharine oversaw construction of the St. Francis de Sales High School for black girls. As always, she directed this project with a diligence and attention to detail that would have made her banker father proud.

St. Francis de Sales opened in October 1899, though not before someone had set fire to the barn just before the sisters from St. Elizabeth's Convent arrived in July. This was neither the first nor last time the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament would embark on a project in the face of deep-seated ill will.

The work of the congregation in the Diocese of Richmond extended beyond St. Francis's school grounds. In addition to going out into the community to help the poor directly, the sisters soon began a forty-year-long apostolate to nearby prisons. Mother Katharine's chance discovery of a private Catholic chapel along the train route to Lynchburg led to the formation of a Sunday school in Columbia, Virginia.

One of Mother Katharine's most challenging goals was the establishment of a mission to the Navajos in Arizona. In 1896, she had purchased land for the mission, but was immediately faced with the usual problem of finding priests to work there. In October 1898, three Franciscan priests arrived, eager to help Mother Katharine realize her dream. With their assistance, particularly their groundbreaking efforts to learn the notoriously difficult Navajo language, Mother Katharine was able to open St. Michael's School in 1902.

The next major undertaking for the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament was Immaculate Conception Academy, a school for black girls in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1905, when Mother Katharine purchased the property for the academy, Nashville was not a city that welcomed the idea of Catholics teaching blacks in a white neighborhood. The bishop of Nashville, Thomas Byrne, arranged for a third party to buy the property, after Mother Katharine settled for a quick look at it from a closed carriage.

All in all, that was a memorable day for Mother Katharine and her traveling companion, Mother Mary Mercedes. It was the eve of the Feast of the Purification, one of the congregation's fast days. Due to a late train the day before and an unexpected snowstorm, they returned for supper to the Dominican convent where they were staying without having eaten a full meal in more than thirty hours. Thinking they had had a large dinner that afternoon with Bishop Byrne, and knowing that it was a fast day for them, the Dominican sister caring for them served them a little bread, tea, and cake. Mother Mercedes, in her account of this trip, wrote, "For the first time in years, Mother Katharine consumed two pieces of cake!"

When the man who sold Mother Katharine the property for their academy learned what it would be used for, he attempted first to buy it back, then to bribe Bishop Byrne into getting another order to take over the property, and finally to have the city run a street directly through the property. All of his attempts came to nothing, and the school opened in September 1905. By the end of the school year, the original building was too small for the enrollment, and a larger school had to be built. Immaculate Conception Academy continued to thrive until 1954, when the schools of Nashville were integrated and the academy was closed.

Establishing new missions for her spiritual daughters was not all that Mother Katharine was doing at this time. In addition to her duties as Mother General, she was Mistress of Novices for the congregation, and she still had her inheritance to disburse — with great liberality yet great care — among all the Indian and black missions that sought her assistance. She was also occupied with getting Vatican approval for the rule for her community. Work on this began in 1894 and continued until 1907. Shortly before Mother Katharine was ready to send the final version of the rule to Rome, she received a surprise visitor to St. Elizabeth's Convent, Mother Cabrini of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Mother Cabrini advised her, "If you want to get your Rule approved, you go yourself to Rome and take it with you."

When Mother Katharine arrived in Rome in May, 1907, Monsignor Richard Kennedy of the American College told her the priest who was to help her translate the rule into ecclesial Latin had died and there was no one else available at the time. Distraught, she went to the Minerva and prayed for assistance at the tomb of St. Catherine of Siena. Two days later, Monsignor Kennedy informed her that he had dined the day before with a priest from Philadelphia who had just finished preparing the constitution of the Philadelphia Franciscans. This priest, Fr. Joseph Schwarz, C.SS.R., agreed to help, and within three weeks he and a translator he procured were providing the printer with pages of the rule as fast as they could be printed. Less than two months after she arrived, Mother Katharine left Rome with her rule approved by the Pope for a trial period of five years.

1912 was a busy year for the 53-year-old Mother General. In addition to all her other duties, Mother Katharine was personally involved in arrangements for opening missions in Columbus, New York City, and Chicago. For her, involvement meant trudging through Harlem in the heat of summer looking for suitable housing, and working from morning till night helping to clean and prepare the new convents. During a visitation of St. Catherine's in Santa Fe, however, she contracted typhoid and was forced to rest at the Albuquerque Sanitarium. After the doctor told her his diagnosis, she settled back in bed and said, "Well, I feel perfect peace on an occasion like this, as this is certainly not according to my plans, and it must be God's Will."

Naturally, the entire Community was alarmed at the news, the more so because she insisted that no one from the mother-house come to visit her. She even forbade her sister Louise from coming. As a result, Louise's husband, Edward Morrell, arrived in Albuquerque and took charge of his sister-in-law. He arranged for her nursing, insisted on certain medical tests, and paid for a private train car to take her back to Philadelphia by a low-altitude route. Mother Katharine recovered, and was well enough to travel to Rome in the spring of 1913 for the final approbation of the congregation's rule.

Although Louisiana had a large population of black Catholics, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament did not open a mission there for many years. Mother Katharine did not want to do anything that would hurt the Sisters of the Holy Family, a black congregation centered in New Orleans. In 1915, however, the Archbishop of New Orleans asked her to open a school there that might develop into a college. This was a task that was too large for the Sisters of the Holy Family to undertake, and Mother Katharine eagerly accepted the invitation. Xavier Academy opened in September 1915. It continues today as Xavier University, the only historically black Catholic college in the United States.

These are the tasks with which Mother Katharine Drexel occupied herself, but with what spirit? Of central importance, in her own life and in the life of her congregation, was the Holy Eucharist. She obtained for the mother-house the right to daily exposition and adoration, simply by asking Archbishop Prendergast of Philadelphia. Instead of the refusal she had expected, he replied, "Why, have you not got it? I thought you had."

Mother Katharine once explained what prayer before the Blessed Sacrament offers: "The religious needs strength. Near the tabernacle the soul finds strength, consolation, and resignation. The religious needs virtue. Jesus is the model of virtues in the Blessed Sacrament. The religious needs hope. In the Blessed Sacrament we possess the most precious pledge of our hope."

For Mother Katharine, the Eucharist was a testament of Jesus' boundless love in the sacrifice of the Cross. This was a sacrifice she struggled to perfect in herself, in accepting the sorrows that came to her and in emptying herself of anything that did not give glory to God and serve the poor. She often remained in the chapel after the other sisters left, kneeling before the crucifix, tears streaming down her face as she meditated on the Crucifixion. "There is no other way to heaven," she wrote. "No one's face is toward heaven when it is not toward Calvary."

Another feature of her spirituality was a radical embrace of holy poverty. It was not mere frugality that led her to reuse envelopes she received for memo paper, to bring her own food for train rides, to be vigilant against wasting water and electricity. She lived the Franciscan ideal of poverty as a way to draw close to Jesus, Who, in her words, "lived poor, died poor, and the last treasure He gave away was His mother."

"If you are to keep the congregation in existence," she once wrote, "poverty must be its first entrenchment. One single man, Francis, sustained the wall of the Church — through extreme poverty. All saints lived poor lives. The Sister unfaithful to poverty is an enemy of her congregation."

But Mother Katharine was a saint, and it is very difficult to be a gloomy saint. Her letters to St. Elizabeth's, written during her visitations of the missions, show the same sense of humor and wonder that she had as a young woman writing home from her European tours. In person, she was engaging, filled with energy and enthusiasm for whatever lay before her, and above all joyful. One sister later recalled how, when as a postulant in 1926 she waited to meet the Mother General, her vision of a tall, austere woman was shattered when the real Mother General arrived at the mother-house, looked at her, and said, "Oh, a new postulant. Goody, goody, goody."

This was the spirit needed to sustain the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in their work. To the countless challenges of the apostolate itself was often added the raw prejudice of local white people. Nashville was far from the only place in America where the idea of Catholics helping blacks and Indians was greeted with hatred. This hatred was directed against the congregation from its earliest days, when rumors were spread of planned violence during the laying of the mother-house's cornerstone.

The life of Mother Katharine, and that of her congregation, was to enter a new phase in 1935. After nearly forty-five years of constant toil, her health began to fail. She had a minor heart attack in Philadelphia, later a fainting spell on a visitation to St. Michael's Mission in Arizona, and finally a very serious heart attack in Chicago. Once transferred to a Philadelphia hospital, she was informed by her doctor that she must abandon her exhaustive schedule if she wanted to live.

Mother Katharine accepted this advice with equanimity. Her primary duties were transferred to her vicar, Mother Mercedes, who was formally elected the second Mother General of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1937. Mother Katharine moved into the infirmary at the mother-house, her prayers and example continuing the work of instruction and guidance that her body was no longer capable of. Following Mother Mercedes's death in 1940, the last of Mother Katharine's administrative duties were transferred.

1941 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Catholic America made clear the esteem in which Mother Katharine was held. During a three-day celebration in April, cardinals and bishops joined graduates of the congregation's schools to honor the foundress. Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia called Mother Katharine "a shining glory, not only of Philadelphia, but also of our whole nation." Bishop Cushing of Boston wrote that she was "immortalized...in my memory and that of many others as the foremost individual benefactress of missionary work of the Catholic Church in North America." Pope Pius XII, too, sent a letter of congratulations and blessing.

The accolades did not end there. In 1939, the Catholic University of America had bestowed an honorary doctorate upon her, the first woman so honored by the university. In the jubilee year of 1941, Duquesne and Emmanuel College in Boston also conferred honorary doctorates on her, and St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia gave both her and her sister Louise honorary Doctor of Law degrees. The day after the ceremony at St. Joseph's, a sister stopped by Mother Katharine's room to say, "Our Mother is a doctor."

"Oh, I am a lot of doctors now!" she replied with a smile.

Mother Katharine spent her retirement in constant prayer and contemplation. It was the life the young Kate Drexel had hoped for, before Bishop O'Connor convinced her to found an active order. She wrote out her prayers on slips of paper, checking them off as she recited them. Twice a day, she prayed a fifteen-decade Rosary; she knew and recited many traditional litanies of the Church.

Her special love, though, continued to be Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. While her health permitted, she spent much of her time in view of the tabernacle in St. Elizabeth's chapel. She allowed herself one hour in the night for "nocturnal adoration" in her bed, though she often spent far more than that lost in meditation. Following a serious operation in 1943, she was given permission by Cardinal Dougherty to have Mass said in her room. The altar before which she had received her first Holy Communion was installed in her room, and she was able to assist at daily Mass for the rest of her life.

Mother Katharine recorded her meditations and intentions along with her prayers. As she called upon the mercy and love of God for others, she also sought an understanding of her own death in the light of the Eucharist. "Every activity," she wrote, "is a spiritual exercise preparing me for the coming of Christ — when He shall come to me at the hour of death."

In her attempt to unite herself perfectly to Jesus, Mother Katharine was both frank and critical towards her failings, just as she had been as a schoolgirl. One of her meditations reads, "It is hard to suffer patiently and lovingly. I offer it as a prayer for mercy for my innumerable sins and to obtain grace to do so through Mary, uniting my suffering to Our Lord in the host."

Louise Morrell died in 1943, a model to the end of the life Bishop O'Connor had once envisioned for Kate. As a Third Order Franciscan, Louise always treated her wealth as given to her to give to the poor. She came to visit her ailing sister every week, and her own unexpected death dealt Mother Katharine a cruel blow. But even as her tears fell, Mother Katharine struggled to accept the will of God: "It is not that I want anything different from what God wants... I cannot believe it."

Mother Katharine's own death came, after a night of troubled breathing, on March 3, 1955. Her casket was placed in St. Elizabeth's chapel for two days, while unexpected crowds of people filed past to catch a glimpse of the body of a saint. Her funeral Mass, at Philadelphia's Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, was celebrated by Philadelphia Archbishop O'Hara, who was assisted by more than 250 bishops, priests, and brothers. The cathedral, where Katie Drexel had so often attended Mass as a child, was overflowing with people who had come for the funeral. Her body was interred in a crypt beneath the chapel of St. Elizabeth, where it remains as an object of veneration for the pilgrims attracted by her sanctity.

Following her death, the income with which she had supported the work of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament stopped. Under the terms of her father's will, the principal was divided among the charities Francis Drexel had identified in 1884. Mother Katharine had spent twenty million dollars on the poor over the years, while she herself lived a life of evangelical poverty.

The cause for her canonization was opened by Philadelphia Archbishop John Cardinal Krol in 1964. Through her intercession, a teenage boy named Roger Gutherman had his hearing restored in 1974, leading to her 1988 beatification. Hearing of Roger's story, the family of a deaf toddler named Amy Wells began praying to Bl. Katharine in 1993. Amy's miraculous cure cleared the way for Pope John Paul II to announce, on March 10, 2000, his approval of Bl. Katharine's canonization.

(c) 2002
By Tom Kreitzberg

Tom Kreitzberg is a mathematician by training, a software developer by occupation, a Lay Dominican by profession, and a writer by night. His short stories, articles, and clerihews have appeared in a variety of publications, both in-print and on-line. He founded the Short Crime Fiction Review website and edits the Short Mystery Fiction Society's quarterly newsletter. He lives with his wife and children in suburban Maryland.

This chapter is reprinted with permission from the book, Saints of the Jubilee (1stBooks, 2002). Saints of the Jubilee is available through 1stBooks. Telephone: 1-888-280-7715 Online: http://www.1stbooks.com/bookview/9831