A life of privilege beckoned, but it wasn’t what this wealthy heiress desired.
Our culture is obsessed with celebrities, many of whom are famous in proportion to the money they inherited. It is not so much what they have achieved in their own lifetimes, but rather how big are their bank balances left by daddy; that’s what draws the paparazzi likes bees to blooming flowers, and the gossip-hungry readership of the world follows in their wake.
And yet, behind the startling pictures and fascinating headlines, so often there is sheer misery. In 1975, Christina Onassis, famous heiress to her father Aristotle Onassis’ fortune, struck a poignant note when she said, ‘Happiness is not based on money, and the best proof of this is our family.’ Edie Sedgwick, born into a prominent Massachusetts family, appeared in Vogue magazine, had songs written about her by Bob Dylan, and featured in films by Andy Warhol, but died of a drug overdose at the age of 28. Hutton. Cunard. The list could go on.
The woman we celebrate here was also an heiress, one of the richest in America in her day, and yet her life could not possibly have been more different from the parade of well-heeled personalities offered up to be devoured by the public in the last two hundred years. Her life of achievement was crafted from early days by the example of her parents, devout Catholics both.
Katharine Drexel was born to Francis and Hannah Drexel in 1858. Her mother did not recover from childbirth and died five weeks after. Francis, a banker and multimillionaire, later remarried; his second wife was Emma Bouvier (long-ago distant relative, yes, of Jacqueline Kennedy nee Bouvier).
The Drexel parents would open their home to the poor two days a week, and the entire family – which also included Katharine’s two sisters – would assist the neediest in the community of Philadelphia by offering food, clothing and rent assistance.
Emma died of cancer, and when Francis passed on, he left an estate of $15.5 million (which equates to about $400 million in today’s terms), divided between his daughters and several charities.
The focus of their philanthropic charity work became native American Indians. When the sisters visited Pope Leo XIII to ask for some missionaries to help in their work, the Holy Father suggested Katharine should become a nun and supervise the work directly. After some reflection, Katharine joined the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Pittsburgh, but soon established her own order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Coloured People. The very title of the order resonates with love and a desire for social justice – and this all happened in the 1890s, seventy years before the ‘I Have A Dream’ speech of Martin Luther King and the social consciousness we now tend to associate with the latter part of the 20th century.
The first school opened by Drexel’s order was St Catherine’s Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. By the end of her working life, Drexel had founded 50 missions for native Americans in 16 states. A secondary school which she founded in New Orleans for African Americans later developed into Xavier University. The order continues to serve their peoples in 21 states and in Haiti. As such, Saint Katharine Drexel and her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament are akin to Australia’s own Sister Mary Mackillop and her Brown Josephites.
Drexel could have squandered a fortune on self-indulgence, and instead, blessed numberless lives with the waters of social justice.
Sr Katharine Drexel
1858-1955
Feast 3 March