From the desk of the Tar Heel disciple:
February 28, 2026 (#80)
Saint Katharine Drexel
St. Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), born to a wealthy Philadelphia family and who became the foundress of a community of women religious, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, dedicated to the evangelization of Black and Indigenous peoples, was declared a saint by the Catholic Church on October 1, 2000, by Pope St. John Paul II. Her feast day is celebrated each year on the anniversary of her death, March 3.
Katharine’s own mother died five weeks after her birth, and she was mostly raised by her step-mother, Emma Bouvier, a devout Catholic, who instilled in her and her sister a deep sense of attention and service in response to the needs of the poor. When her parents died, the two surviving young women inherited a large fortune, the corpus of which was held in trust and from which they received monthly allowances, out of which they were very generous to the needy, especially African American and Indian Catholic missions in the U.S. In 1886, during an audience with Pope Leo XIII, she was encouraged to become a missionary herself. In 1891, she founded her religious community, after a short period of formation with the Sisters of Mercy. As a nun, she continued to receive the monthly allowances her father's will had established and gave away the great sums of money she received from it. She led her community as the superior general until 1937, when illness forced her retirement from all administrative responsibilities. From that time until her death, she lived a largely contemplative life.
Though she never established a community of her sisters in North Carolina, the distribution of her wealth reached several locations and ministries in the Tar Heel state, including the parish at Newton Grove. Her benefactions there made possible the physical expansion of the (sill extant) parish church and the support of a school for the Black children of that community. There and elsewhere, whenever she gave money for the building or expansion of a Catholic chapel or church, she insisted on a guarantee that Black people would always be welcomed in those buildings…or her money was to be refunded!
St. Katharine Drexel, pray for us!
Written and devotional materials related to St. Katharine Drexel can be found at:
https://inhisname.com/search?options%5Bprefix%5D=last&q=st+katharine+drexel
