Mother Katharine Drexel

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by Cheryl C. D. Hughes


  Rock Castle took four years to build, from July 1895 until the fall of 1899. In July 1899, Mother Katharine and a companion went out to the school site to ready it for the arrival of its first teachers. She had chosen nine sisters to be its first faculty. When she arrived at the nearby train station, the farmer she had hired to manage the property, a former slave, greeted her with bad news. The new barn at St. Francis de Sales had been vandalized and burned to the ground. Once again, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament were not wholeheartedly welcomed by their new neighbors. Mother Katharine was undaunted, even though the fire cost the order another $4,000. The school opened on time, in the fall. The sister assigned to be the first superior at Rock Castle had been in a carriage accident the previous spring, so another had to be appointed in her place. Even though St. Francis de Sales was intended as a boarding school for African American girls, its first student was an Indian from St. Stephen’s School in Wyoming. Indians and blacks were all brothers and sisters of color to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. One could occasionally find an Indian among the black orphans in Holy Providence School at the motherhouse in Cornwells Heights. In the first semester of St. Francis de Sales School, thirty-one students enrolled. A small tuition was charged to those who could afford it; otherwise the girls’ room, board, clothing, and medical care were provided by the order.

  The new buildings were not without their problems. Because they had been empty for so long, the rats had moved in. It took more than a year to get the rat problem under control. More importantly, the heating system did not work, and in a winter that turned out to be unseasonably cold, this was a disaster. The sisters’ efforts to get the contractor to repair the system failed, so they replaced it with another system. The order then had to sue the initial contractor. The suit failed in the lower courts, but the congregation won on appeal, so the company eventually paid for the new system as well as punitive damages to the order.

  From the beginning, Mother Katharine had envisioned her missions making visits and performing social services in the areas surrounding them. In the Rock Castle area were many poor black families; many included former slaves. Their poverty brought with it a great deal of sickness. The sisters shared food and medicine with the poor in their neighborhood. They even went into homes where typhoid had struck down the inhabitants. A nearby prison also benefited from the services of the sisters. Their first prison visitation must have been very difficult, as the prisoner was condemned to die for his crimes. The sisters prepared him for baptism, which he received on December 29, 1902, two days before his execution.23 Mother Katharine felt very keenly for her daughters at Rock Castle. For their first Christmas in Virginia, she wrote to them:

  My very dear children in the Blessed Sacrament

  At St. Francis de Sales:

  You will not be with my flock at St. Elizabeth’s at Christmastide. I shall miss each dear child of mine with whom it has been my privilege to be in such close relations in those sweet Christmases of the past. And, you too, will miss us, just a little, I hope. This is natural. Our Lord gave us our nature and He will not be displeased with us because we miss each other. . . . You have left us to bring in imitation of Our Lord the blessings of redemption to the souls for whom He is born in such poverty, abandonment, and suffering.

  See His little arms; they are opened wide to receive the souls you will bring to Him in Virginia. Last year the house of St. Francis de Sales stood as it does now on the rolling hilltop overlooking the James; but to the eyes of Faith, how different now from then. It encloses within the walls, as the case in Bethlehem, its God. And you, His spouses, are there as St. Joseph and Mary to adore and worship and love Him in His first Christmas at St. Francis de Sales. Really, I see little difference in one way, between His birth at Bethlehem and His birth in this land where He has never been before on this Christmas day — the spot where my dear daughters will be at the Midnight Mass of 1899.24

  It is clear that she, who remained a consecrated virgin, nonetheless expressed deeply held emotional maternal ties with her spiritual daughters. The point of missing one’s separated family members is expressed in terms similar to those employed within the Drexel family when they were separated on their various trips abroad or to the country or seaside. She was so attached to her sisters and in awe of the work they did that she actually tried to kiss their feet during a 1913 visit. They were horrified at her attempt. She explained herself this way: “It was no real joke, my trying to kiss your feet — privileged feet indeed of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament who walk in distant parts from the dear motherhouse and away from parents and friends to bring the glad tidings of the redemption. You who have left all things to follow Jesus, Jesus Himself is and will be your reward in the eternal motherhouse where each Sister of the Blessed Sacrament has her throne awaiting her.”25

  St. Michael’s, St. Michael’s, Arizona

  In 1896, while St. Francis de Sales was being built, Mother Katharine bought land in Arizona to establish a mission for Navajo Indians. She called the mission St. Michael’s; it is still actively staffed today by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, but its beginnings were inauspicious. As early as 1744, two Franciscan priests ventured into Navajo country and reported that the Indians there were receptive to learning more about Christianity. However, the Navajos were a pastoral people living in a harsh climate in a remote country that was less than inviting to missionaries. Unlike the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, they knew little of Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. Under Grant’s Peace Policy, the Presbyterians had been given the Navajos around Fort Defiance, Arizona, to proselytize, but their efforts were unsuccessful. In the early 1890s, the Methodists and the Episcopalians had attempted missions among them, which also failed. Mr. Frank Walker, who was one-half Navajo and who was later hired as the handyman, caretaker, and interpreter for St. Michael’s Mission, wrote to Archbishop Jean Baptiste Salpointe about the Navajos in Arizona: “The Navajos speak more Spanish than English. Medicine men have no influence on the younger element of their race; their religion is dying out. The Navajos are well disposed to receive the teachings of the Catholic priests. Strange to say, although the reservation has had for many years a great number of Protestant preachers of all denominations there is not, I think, a single Protestant Navajo.”26

  Father Stephan, of the Catholic Indian Bureau, sat down with Mother Katharine in 1895 to plan a Catholic mission there. With funding from Mother Katharine, he bought a parcel of land six miles outside of Fort Defiance and a mile from the 3.5-million-acre reservation. He asked various men’s religious orders to staff the mission with priests, but none would promise to do so permanently. St. Michael’s seemed to be heading toward the same predicament as St. Stephen’s in Wyoming. Fr. Stephan was so keen to open a Catholic mission for the Navajos that he offered to leave the Bureau and staff the mission himself, but Mother Katharine thought he had best stay at the Bureau. He contacted the Cincinnati Province of Franciscans about staffing the mission. He reported back to Mother Katharine: “I spoke to a Franciscan Father of the Province of Cincinnati who are good, pious, and hard working priests, like the Sanguinists. I got real encouragement and hope we may get them for the Navajo Indians. They are mostly Americans and adapted for the work; there is a ‘go ahead’ in them.”27 He may have been encouraged, but the answer of the Franciscans was still vague. Mother Katharine visited them personally in the fall of 1897 and secured their commitment to St. Michael’s. So strong was their commitment to the Navajo that they have been at St. Michael’s ever since.

  It took some doing to untangle the title to the property that Fr. Stephan had bought for the mission, because some of it belonged to the federal government and could only be granted as a homestead to an individual, and not to an institution or congregation of priests or nuns. The Franciscans, who take a vow of complete poverty that does not allow them to own property, could not take legal possession of the title. Also, there were problems with white
claim-jumpers, who tried to get bits of the site in complicated legal maneuverings. Eventually the property considerations were ironed out, and three Franciscan priests arrived at St. Michael’s on October 5, 1898. They oversaw the construction of the buildings and made the necessary improvements to the land to support the mission. Everything was underwritten by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

  The next major hurdle was the very difficult Navajo language, which, of course, none of the priests spoke. It was an unwritten language. The priests “originated a new code to record it. With the help of two boys, Charley Day, aged nineteen, and Sammy Day, sixteen, they went through Webster’s [dictionary] from A to Z.”28 The priests also used the Montgomery Ward mail-order catalogue with the children to identify Navajo terms for various items. Eventually they would write the first books ever published in Navajo, a Catholic catechism and an ethnographic dictionary of the Navajo language, which were printed on a St. Michael’s printing press.

  The mission of St. Michael’s was in the desert, so finding a good source of water was important. The only water on the property, a stream, was not drinkable and not even clean enough to wash clothes in. Mother Katharine wrote to her sisters in Cornwells Heights about the water situation in Arizona:

  Shall we find limpid waters? That depends on your prayers. Today we visited the little church at Newton, and I told our Lord the truth when I said to Him it was easy for Him to give you all to drink. . . . I told Our Lord that better would it be for us to drink muddy temporal waters always in this short span of life, provided that He gave us His own pure living waters. With that great gift we shall never thirst, and the Navajos will never thirst, but will become God’s own most dear children in the Blessed Sacrament to them as the gift of God dwelling in their hearts, as in a sanctuary. Yet Our Lord can give us, if He wish, both the spiritual and temporal waters.29

  To make matters worse, the muddy stream occasionally flooded over its banks, so one of the buildings had to be moved to higher ground to save it from damage in flash floods. Finally clean water was found after several dry wells were dug.

  The next challenge was to secure students for the school. The Navajo elders believed that schooling in the government boarding schools had rendered their children unfit for life on the reservation.30 They were leery of the white man’s education. Mother Katharine met with them to discuss the curriculum for St. Michael’s. They stressed to her a need for vocational training, so she planned a curriculum that included harness making, carpentry, wagon construction, shoemaking, and the native arts of weaving and silver smelting, along with basic courses in English, mathematics, geography, U.S. history, and, of course, religion. She held a feast to entice the Indians. She also attended their feasts and ceremonies. She even once partook of a “wee bit” of a peyote button during one such ceremony. She reported that the ceremony was not unlike the Catholic celebration of the Eucharist, except that it went on for five or six hours. The peyote, she said, was “very bitter.”31 As a gesture of good will and to allay the elders’ fears, she invited them to send five Navajo children, accompanied by three Navajo elders, to St. Catherine’s in Santa Fe to see the SBS Indian mission and education at first hand. The parents also feared they would be cut off from their children once they were ensconced in boarding school. Mother Katherine assured them that parents and other family members would always be welcome and that she would provide accommodations for them, as well as hay for their horses. The Navajo headmen were impressed, especially after they witnessed her playing a friendly game with their children of throwing stones at a tin can. They promised to send their children to the school once it opened.

  Mother Katharine was interested in every aspect of the development of the new mission. After the rat infestation at Rock Castle, she was perhaps overly concerned about the rats and mice in Arizona. The Day family, who lived on the property, had complained of rats, so she wrote to the priests: “In one of my private letters I intended asking you if you will be kind enough to procure some ‘Rough on Rats’ and put it around the Day’s house in the various rooms and [in the other buildings]. . . . It would be well to distribute some ‘Rough on Rats.’ I know from experience how destructive mice are; in an empty building they usually hold sway.”32

  She visited St. Michael’s in October of 1902 to see if it was ready for her sisters. She found that the five rooms set aside for the twelve sisters did not have roofs. By the time they arrived at the end of the month, four of the rooms were roofed. It was typical for the sisters to move into an uncompleted mission, school, and convent. In fact, St. Michael’s was bereft of heat and indoor plumbing for the sisters until the 1940s. The children and their needs always came first.

  Missionary work, even that sustained by the supernatural, entails physical and emotional hardships. Mother Katharine had put it this way in trying to cheer her sisters at St. Catherine’s mission: “But remember this always: it is the supernatural which has called you here and it is only the supernatural which will sustain you and keep you here.”33 Yet those missionary sisters who left their homes and families for places far from home and lacking in the amenities of home found themselves exhausted from their labors. Physical comforts, or discomforts, were nothing compared to the actual work of the missions.

  The actual workday of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament began at 4:30 in the morning, when the sister in charge of cooking arose to start the fire and to milk the cows and bring in the eggs, and the “caller” sister began to awaken the other sisters. Before breakfast, the sisters spent one-half hour in meditation in the chapel followed by reading the daily office and Mass. Breakfast was accompanied by a lecture on the rule of the order and followed by the making of beds and other light “charges,” or chores. The sisters began their regular assigned work after their morning chores. Some sisters taught students, while others made home visitations, another important aspect of their missionary work. Others did heavier housecleaning in the chapel, convent, or school, or looked after the convent’s gardens and livestock. The heavy chores were shared by all the sisters on a rotating basis. Sometime during the day, they were required to spend one-half hour visiting the Blessed Sacrament and fifteen minutes each in spiritual reading and in the examination of conscience. The main meal of the day was the noon dinner. Throughout the day, silence reigned, except in relation to assigned duties. Even during meals, except on Wednesdays, the sisters practiced silence. Dinner was accompanied four times a week by readings from a spiritual book. After dinner, the sisters enjoyed a short recreation time before returning to the duties, which would carry on until late afternoon. Another recreation, usually a walk, carried the sisters through until supper. After supper, the sisters could take another walk, visit the Blessed Sacrament, complete their grading of the children’s work, or finish other work of the day. They also spent their evening hours in a sewing circle, making and mending clothes for the children and themselves. Their day done, they were allowed to share its highlights with one another. After night prayers in the chapel, the convent lights were turned off at 10:00 in the evening. On major feast days and holidays, talking could begin at breakfast, and extra food was allowed at all meals; on those days there would be no school or other assigned charges to take them away from their sororal pleasures.34

  It can be seen from this list of daily activities that Katharine Drexel was as concerned for her sisters’ spiritual health as she was for their physical and emotional well-being. It was a strict regimen, but one with a purpose. Her sisters spent a minimum of two hours a day fostering their spiritual health. She had them flexing their souls as well as their muscles. Their food might have been nourishing but spare, but their superior ensured that their daily nourishment by the Eucharist was extended by the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and that the supernatural would sustain them in their efforts. It was a regimen that appeared to be successful. After one of her annual visits to St. Michael’s, she wrote to her sisters there, “See Jesus and Mary in your Si
sters when you speak to each of them or serve them. Love one another as Jesus has loved you. It pleased me much to see your cheerfulness at the recreation. Continue this holy cheerfulness. Let there be no ‘Sister Vinegars’ at St. Michael’s.”35

  Immaculate Mother, Nashville, Tennessee

  Thomas Byrne, the bishop of Nashville, had been in touch with Mother Katharine since 1900, when he asked her to open a mission and school for African Americans in his diocese. She was unable to meet his request at first, but wrote him a check for $2,667 to cover one-third the cost of building a church in Nashville for black Catholics. The bishop was persistent. He managed to see Mother Katharine in 1904 while she was visiting her missions in the West. His doctor had sent him to the desert for his health, and there he met Katharine and finally convinced her to open a school for African Americans in Nashville. He had observed that her sisters in Santa Fe were doing well in what he called “uphill Work,” and was convinced they would succeed in his diocese.36 It would be quite challenging to establish the school because of the objections of the politically powerful. Santa Fe had been an anthill compared to the mountain of objections and difficulties in Nashville.

  In 1904, Katharine Drexel oversaw an order of 104 sisters eager to serve in the mission fields. She was no starry-eyed reformer but a realist, who nonetheless felt called to a very difficult apostolate. On the retreat she made before entering the convent in Pittsburgh, she made the following resolution:

 

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