Katharine Drexel, Founder Of Xavier University And Catholic Religious Order Which Helped Blacks, Canonized At The Vatican

Jet, Oct 23, 2000

Katharine Mary Drexel, founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, recently was named a saint.

Mother Drexel also founded Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation's only predominantly Black Catholic university. She founded the New Orleans school in 1925 because at the time no Catholic university in the South was prepared to accept Blacks.

Pope John Paul II added Drexel and 122 others to the list of saints in ceremonies at the Vatican in Rome.

The sanction made Drexel the Roman Catholic Church's second U.S.-born saint. She devoted her life and her wealthy philanthropic Philadelphia family's $20 million fortune to missionary work for the justice and education of Blacks and Native Americans.

On the day she was canonized, more than 3,000 people came to kneel at her tomb, the Blessed Katharine Drexel Shrine in the Philadelphia suburb of Bensalem, and to pray in Bensalem's St. Elizabeth's Chapel, part of the original convent Drexel opened in 1892.

Mother Drexel was sponsored for canonization in 1964 after a boy was healed from deafness in one ear when his parents prayed in her name. That miracle, along with another of the same magnitude, involved the restoration of hearing to hearing-impaired children. Both miracles were attributed to Drexel by the Roman Catholic Church.

St. Drexel founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored in 1891. Today the order is simply called the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

On Nov. 20, 1988, Drexel was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

She died on March 3, 1955, in Cornwelis Heights, PA, at the age of 96. At the time of her death, she had distributed some $20 million, more than the total of the trust fund bequeathed to herself and her two sisters.