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152 • Part I. The Creed: The Faith Professed
income from her father’s trust—$350,000 a year in the 1900s—to build over
sixty schools in the rural U.S. West and South. She also established Xavier
University in New Orleans, the only Catholic African American college in
the United States. She struggled for civil rights, taking on the Ku Klux Klan
and financing some of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People’s investigations into exploitation of African American
workers. Throughout her lifetime, Mother Katharine Drexel gave more than
$21 million to help found churches, schools, and hospitals across the
United States.
In 1935, Mother Katharine suffered a severe heart attack, and for the
next twenty years, she lived in prayerful retirement. Her interest and love
for the missions deepened until her death on March 3, 1955.
Pope John Paul II canonized Mother Katharine Drexel on October 1,
2000. She had lived the true meaning and virtue of the Gospel, with heart-
felt generosity. She put her money and her life where her heart was—with
her beloved African and Native Americans.
St. Katharine drew immense spiritual strength from her devotion to the
Eucharist. In her adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, she discovered how
to surrender herself totally to God. She wrote, “The Eucharist is a never-ending sacrifice. It is the Sacrament of love, the act of love.” She often
prayed to Christ in the Eucharist: “Help me each moment today and
always to communicate myself to you by doing your will. Let the doing
of your will each moment be a spiritual communion. In it you will give me
yourself. I will give you myself.”
11
In her work for Native and African Americans, St. Katharine Drexel fol-
lowed Christ’s words describing his care as the Good Shepherd for the
sheep: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn
10:10). She wanted those whom she served to have a greater fullness of
life now and to achieve the ultimate fullness of life in eternity.
As God’s holy people,we,too,share in holy mysteries such as the Eucharist,
but we are also related to all other members of the Church—those still living
and those who have preceded us into the Kingdom of Heaven. We are, thus,
part of the Communion of Saints. In this chapter, we consider our journey
from life through death to the perfection of the Communion of Saints
in eternity.
•
11 Quoted in Ellen Tarry,
Saint Katharine Drexel
(Boston: Pauline Books and Media,
2000), 149.