of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 19. St. Elizabeth Convent, motherhouse of the Sisters of the Blessed
Sacrament, Bensalem, Pennsylvania (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 20. SBS novices in white veils at the motherhouse
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 21. St. Catherine’s Mission for Pueblo Indians, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
the first SBS mission. Students with Sr. Kateri Dunn (1894)
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 22. St. Michael’s Mission, Arizona, still under construction circa 1900.
Opened in 1902 (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 23. St. Michael’s Mission. Navajo girls performing traditional dances
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 24. St. Michael’s Mission football team and band
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 25. Mother Katharine with her sister Louise Morrell (Mrs. Edward Morrell)
(Archives of the Sisters of
the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 26. Mother Katharine, second from left, visiting Hopi Indians (1927)
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 27. Mother Katharine, far right, visiting Navajo Indians
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 28. Bishop Patrick John Ryan, adviser to St. Katharine after death of Bishop O’Connor (1886) (Philadelphia Archdiocesan
Historical Research Center)
Figure 29. Graduates of St. Francis de Sales School, Rock Castle, Virginia (1923) (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 30. Boys of the lower grades, Immaculate Mother School, Nashville,
Tennessee, opened in 1905 (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 31. Old Xavier University on Magazine Street in New Orleans.
The building had been bought by Mother Katharine from Southern University.
Later it housed Xavier Preparatory School. The university opened in 1917
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, with permission from Xavier
University Archives and Special Collections, New Orleans)
Figure 32. Some early graduates of Xavier University (1929)
(Xavier University Archives and Special Collections, New Orleans)
Figure 33. Xavier University was famous for its fine arts, including grand opera.
Opera students in costume with Sr. Elise Carmen, head of the opera program
(Archives of the Sisters of
the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 34. Mother Katharine with families of Xavier graduates
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 35. Holy Ghost School, New Orleans. At one time this was the largest parochial school in the United States (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 36. Mother Katharine on the Mississippi River. She was preparing
to go into the bayous to establish schools for African American children
(Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 37. Mother
Katherine in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. She regularly made the rounds of
schools she had funded
or founded (Archives of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)
Figure 38. St. Patrick’s School in Anadarko, Oklahoma.
Not an SBS school, but funded by Mother Katharine
(Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries)
Figure 39. St. Teresa’s Institute for Creek Girls in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (1899).
Not an SBS school, but funded by Mother Katharine
(Courtesy of Holy Family Cathedral Archives)
Figure 40. St. Mary’s Academy outside of Sacred Heart, Oklahoma.
Funded by Mother Katharine, who helped fund all seventeen Indian
Catholic schools and missions in Oklahoma (Department of Special
Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries)
Figure 41. Pope John Paul II,
the pope who canonized St. Katharine, October 1, 2000
Figure 42. St. Katharine Drexel: “We must attract them with joy”
(Archives of the Sisters of
the Blessed Sacrament)
Chapter 4
The Kenotic and Eucharistic
Spirituality of Katharine Drexel
Katharine Drexel chose a very difficult vocation for her life’s work, but what sustained her throughout was her deep spirituality. Christian life is life lived with Christ in the Spirit. Christian spirituality, in this sense, is the lived experience of the individual. It is the means by which the Christian opens herself up to God and makes herself present to God or, rather, allows God to be present to her. Spirituality constitutes a continuing, lived effort to hear the word of God and to be docile to his Spirit. It is the Christian’s spirituality that prepares the believer both to hear the word of God and to do his bidding. Because the individual’s relationship is with a transcendent God, Christian spirituality also contains something of mystery. Relationships are as varied as the persons involved. There are, therefore, many ways of living out one’s Christian spirituality. Additionally, an individual’s lived Christian experience may change with differing circumstances. There are different paths of Christian spirituality, and the individual Christian may engage many different kinds of spiritualities simultaneously and seriatim. Specific spiritualities are associated with certain religious orders, such as Jesuit, Franciscan, or Benedictine spiritualities; other specific spiritualities are, for instance, Trinitarian or Marian in focus. Katharine’s lived experience of Christ in the Spirit was both kenotic, or self-emptying, and eucharistic. This chapter will explore the kenotic and eucharistic spiritualities through which she was able to conform herself to Christ, to endure, and even to flourish in her vocation as a missionary founder.
Kenotic Spirituality
Kenosis comes into the Christian consciousness most emphatically in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross” (2:5-8). The Greek word employed by St. Paul in this passage is ekenōsen, the aorist form of the verb kenoō. According to Albrecht Oepke, the verb kenoō in Philippians 2:6 implies “to make empty” or “to deprive of content or possessions.”1 In the context of Christian spirituality, kenosis has come to mean the self-emptying of the believer in imitation of Christ as described by St. Paul: “Kenosis is at the heart of Christian life as well as at the core of ministry. Kenosis is the resolute divesting of the person of every claim of self-interest so as to be ready to live the Gospel of Christ in every aspect of living, freed from the dictates of personal preference.”2 Naturally, kenotic spirituality takes many forms. It can mean something as simple as personal humility, as trivial as denying oneself sugar, wine, or other pleasurable foods, or as horrific as freely embracing a martyrdom of the most gruesome sort. The Christian kenotic empties herself of her own desires and will, and takes on the will of God and does his work on earth. As directed by St. Paul, she takes Christ as her exemplar in all things.
This use of kenosis in spirituality is not to be confused with the christological controversy surrounding St. Paul’s use of the term in Philippians 2:7. Some nineteenth-century theologians argued that at the incarnation Christ gave up all or some of his divine powers and attributes to live as a mere man. If this were the correct understanding of kenosis, then the d
ivinity of Christ would be undermined and, thus, the integrity of his sacrifice would be destroyed, along with the immutability of God. According to Reformed theologian Louis Berkhof, “The Christ of the Kenotics is neither God nor man.”3
The father of nineteenth-century christological kenoticism was Gottfried Thomasius (1802-1875), who taught at the University of Erlangen in Germany. Thomasius wrote: “I cannot maintain on the one hand, the full reality of the divine and human natures of Christ, particularly the full truth of the natural development of his human life, and on the other hand, the full unity of his theanthropic person unless I assume a self-limitation of the divine Logos, which took place in the Incarnation, for without this assumption, I cannot conceive of the unity affirmed on the subject.”4 Another of the christological kenoticists wrote: “The Son of God became man, that is, he renounced his self-conscious divine personal being and took the form of a spiritual potence, which self-forgotten, as unconscious formative power worked in the womb of Mary, and formed a body that was fitted so to serve the development of this spiritual potence that it could use it as its own property and become conscious, could develop itself therein, and by means thereof put forth its energy.”5 This understanding of Philippians 2:7 came about in light of the development of the historical-critical method of studying the Bible, the search for the historical Jesus, and the widespread application of the Hegelian dialectic. It had its proponents in both Lutheran and Anglican circles into the early twentieth century and is held in some U.S. evangelical circles today. This christological understanding of kenosis is rejected by more orthodox scholarship. The kenosis important to Katharine was spiritual kenosis.
Katharine would not have applied the term to her own spirituality, because in her day it was not applied to ascetic theology. However, many of her spiritual devotions and activities are most aptly described and identified by it as it has come to be employed in present-day Christian spiritual theology. It is a term that covers the broad range of activities and attitudes that constitute an expressed or implied emptying out of self. Other terms or phrases more often encountered in earlier spiritual writing are “die to self,” “lose one’s life in order to save it,” “self-abasement,” “self-surrender,” “humility,” “self-forgetfulness,” “self-annihilation,” “renounce self,” “entrust oneself to God,” “give oneself over to God,” “relinquish oneself,” “offer oneself,” “desire less,” and “powerless.”6 A cruci-centric and kenotic spirituality is expressed by this meditation from Katharine: “Plunge me with thyself into the Heart of Jesus crucified in order that my poor nature may be consumed in the flame and my life may become pure and holy with Thee!”7
Kenosis is controversial among feminist theologians because many believe that it puts one inherently in a position of powerlessness in a patriarchal Church that has historically denied hierarchical power to women. Daphne Hampson’s critique of kenosis is typical. She maintains that self-emptying and self-abnegation could not have a place in the feminist principles of self-actualization and equality.8 She insists that the vast majority of women, both those who leave patriarchal religions and those who stay within them, find the notion of sacrifice an alienating concept.9 On the other hand, Sarah Coakley and Rosemary Radford Ruether support kenotic spirituality for women as transformative. Ruether advances a theory of power expressed in her description of the kenosis of patriarchy, or the “self-emptying of power as domination.” To exercise power as a means of liberation rather than domination could challenge, she argues, patriarchal constructions of power. “Service to others does not deplete the person who ministers,” she contends, “but rather causes her (or him) to become more liberated.”10 Coakley challenges those who, like Hampson, would critique Ruether’s use of kenosis, by arguing that they reduce the idea of kenosis to only “self-destructive subordination” for women. This way of thinking, Coakley contends, neglects a vital element of what constitutes Christian feminism, in effect, engaging with the paradox of losing one’s life in order to find it.11 In contrast, she distinguishes what she calls a “right” kenosis or “power-in-vulnerability,” grounding this in the practice of contemplative prayer, where a “special form of vulnerability or self-effacement” and “personal empowerment” are held together in the space where a “non-coercive divine power” manifests itself.12 Lamenting what she calls the “repression of all forms of vulnerability” within Christian feminism, she calls for a feminist rereading of the power of the dynamic of the cross and resurrection. In true kenosis, the Christian woman, or man, responds to the divine; the self makes “space,” which leads not to self-loss and silencing of the self, but rather to its “transformation and expansion into God.”13 This is the kenosis recognizable in Katharine. Putting aside the question of exactly what Paul meant when he wrote that Christ emptied himself, it is somewhat paradoxical that Christ emptied himself to become man, and Christians empty themselves to become more like Christ, more divine. Katharine sought ways to make “space” to transform and expand herself into God.
There are quite naturally many ways of being kenotic or expressing kenotic spirituality, and it is reasonable to reinterpret her thoroughly traditional Catholic spirituality in kenotic terms along these same lines. Katharine favored mortification of her flesh and the living out of the evangelical counsels as ways to surrender herself completely to God, to empty herself out in order to be filled with Christ, especially the Christ she found in the Eucharist.
Kenosis through Mortification of the Flesh
Even as a child, Katharine Drexel was aware of the importance and the difficulty of limiting one’s gustatory intake for spiritual reasons. In her childhood spiritual journals, alongside her assessment of her virtues and vices, she constantly mentioned her intention to give up such foods as jams, sugar, butter, fruits, and desserts. That she made vow after vow to give up the same foods indicates that her attempts to be abstemious were most often failed attempts, and that the foods from which she chose to refrain were indeed foods that she enjoyed, and therefore, that their loss was a real sacrifice for her. Her desire to come down to “convent rations” was part of her spiritual development during the period of her vocational discernment. Her eating habits were part of an intuitive self-emptying self-abnegation.
Of course, Catholic Christians of her day regularly practiced fasting and abstinence from meat as part of church discipline. Lent, Fridays, and holy days were days of fasting and/or abstinence.14 The family table was the place where a Catholic child would first learn to discipline the body for the sake of the spirit. From the family table to the refectory table of the convent, Katharine continued her eating habits. When she was the head of her order, her sisters noted that she was fasting to excess. “Finally, the Sisters, fearing for her health, told the Archbishop [Ryan]. He put her under obedience to take regular meals, and she immediately obeyed. For some years the Archbishop was watchful of her external penances, especially in the matter of fasting and denying herself nourishing food.”15 The Annals for 1892 noted the appointment of Rev. John Scully, SJ, as Extraordinary Confessor of the SBS. Father Scully
evidently belonged to the more severe school of spiritual directors, and leaned more to the severer form of observance of the spiritual life, in consequence of which he was using this way of guiding our Mother. She, herself, was very much inclined to the practice of external mortification, and under the direction of Father Scully, she adhered to an extremely severe regimen and her bodily mortifications were excessive. She observed a strict Lenten fast every day and curtailed her food in every way, so much so that the Sisters began to fear that she would undermine her health and thus shorten her days which were so much needed by the little congregation. The matter was brought to the attention of the Archbishop, and he was horrified and immediately put Mother under obedience to take her regular meals and after that for some years, in the matter of the practice of external penance, His Grace was most watchful in regard to Mother.16
Though she obeyed
the archbishop in the amount she ate, she still neglected to take butter or to use condiments that might have made her food more enjoyable.17 When she traveled, she took her eating habits on the road with her. She insisted on carrying what the sisters referred to as her “poverty bag,” which contained cold sandwiches, fruit, and jars of water or coffee to drink. Finally, the archbishop ordered her to take at least one hot meal a day when traveling. Her self-denial of nutrition was a constant theme throughout her life, even after she had recovered from her youthful anorexia. She quite literally emptied herself of nutrition her entire adult life. Had she been able to get away with nothing but hard bread crusts and water like some of the medieval hermits, she probably would have. But hers was a life in community, and a community has eyes to see and ears to hear everything that goes on within its walls. There was little of her kenotic life that was not known. What happened at table was the least of her kenotic practices.
For Katharine, the essence of holiness was to become a “victim of love,” to empty oneself so that Christ might live within: “Let Christ live within us, that is really the sacrifice of self. . . . That is the privilege of the true religious — to be a victim of love in whatever we have to do. . . . To give is to love. That is the idea of the Mass — to give our elder brother, Jesus Christ.”18 She taught her sisters to imitate the self-giving, self-emptying of Christ, and she modeled that behavior: “Self has no place in perfect love . . . self-sacrifice, self-immolation are the fitting expressions in daily life of the love of the soul for the Divine Victim of the Tabernacle.”19 As early as 1881 and ten years before entering the convent, Katharine wrote in her retreat notes, marked front and back in her hand as “Strictly Private,”
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