Mother Katharine Drexel

by Cheryl C. D. Hughes

  Eucharistic Spirituality

  Kenotic spirituality is multivalent. Its various practices, from modesty of the eyes to the flailing of flesh, free the body and the mind for contemplation of the holy. Its aim is to bring to perfection the statement of St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). Katharine emptied herself through prayer, penance, deprivation, and pain so that she could be filled with Christ. She said of herself, “I leave myself and give God my nothing and my sins.”87 More precisely, and most perfectly, she left herself, she emptied herself, so she could be filled with Christ in the Eucharist. Every single person whose interview was recorded in the Positio for Katharine’s canonization made note of her deep eucharistic spirituality. It was her defining characteristic.

  Her eucharistic spirituality was evident to those who knew her, even to those who only knew her casually. She was the founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament — how could it not? If nature abhors a vacuum, so does the spirit, making eucharistic spirituality the perfect complement to kenotic spirituality. The emptying out of self and the filling up with Christ are like lungs expiring and inspiring, creating, in effect, a single life-giving and sustaining action. Each action needs the other. The Eucharist was for Katharine, as it is for the Church, her font and summit.88 It was the highest expression of Christ’s love for her and her love for him. It was, moreover, the inexhaustible source of her spiritual strength.

  The view of the Church of Vatican II, that the Eucharist was its source and summit, was proleptically captured in Katharine’s meditations: “In Holy Communion the life of God in a particular way is imparted to my soul. It is there that God becomes the soul of my soul, to do, to suffer, all for the love of Him who died for me, and if Thou art for me, if Thou art within me, what can I fear, O my God.”89 She refers to Christ as the “Prisoner of Love” and herself as the “Victim of Love.” His unconditional eucharistic love for her overtook her soul and drove her to heroic works of charity because of her love for him, yet she was aware that she was constantly short of the goal of holiness required of her. Typically, she sought for what she needed in the Eucharist. In one of her private prayers, which she commonly wrote down in pencil on small scraps of paper she kept by her bedside, she noted: “By your dear call to me in Religious vocation, I must ever strive for sanctity and holiness and I shall do so only by participating in the holiness of God. Today’s Holy Communion and every Holy Communion is the special means — every Holy Mass.”90 For Catholic Christians, the Eucharist is not just a memorial of Christ’s Last Supper; it is a re-presentation of the sacrifice on Calvary almost two thousand years ago; it makes present that same priest and victim. Every partaking of the consecrated host is a present event that points to the eschatological future. The communicants, redeemed by Christ and nourished by his body and blood, become what they have consumed; according to the prayers of the priest, they become “one body, one spirit in Christ.” As such, they are sent forward from the Mass “to love and serve the Lord.”

  One of the reasons Katharine chose to enter the convent with the Sisters of Mercy was because that order was one of the few that allowed the sisters daily Communion. It was a rule she would adopt for her own order. Mother M. Irenaeus, SBS, who joined Katharine as a novice in the Mercy convent, noted of her founder, “Throughout her Novitiate days and in later life, it seemed to me that when she attended Mass she was totally oblivious of everything . . . around her. The Blessed Sacrament was to her a living, vital reality.”91 Katharine exhorted her sisters, “We must hunger for this Bread of Life [the eucharistic Host] even as the 5,000 in the desert hungered for earthly bread.”92

  Yet even daily Communion was not enough for Katharine. She would spend hours kneeling, or even lying prostrate, in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. “I adore you, my Eucharistic Lord. You are there exposed in the ostensorium. The rays are the rays of Your love for me, for each individual soul.”93 The need to consume the “Bread of Life” was to be complemented by adoration of the paschal victim in the consecrated host. Consequently, in addition to and as an extension of the Mass, her sisters were to spend at least one-half hour daily praying before the Blessed Sacrament, as well as visiting the Blessed Sacrament before and after their daily apostolic work. This was a way of gaining the necessary strength and grace for their very difficult work, but also of reminding the sisters that it was through Christ that the fruits of their labors would be born. It would be Christ, not they, who accomplished the Father’s plan. Christ himself in his monstrance, or Christ in his Tabernacle, would send them forth and receive them home again. A vocation booklet from 1912, written by Mother Katharine, emphasized that her sisters received the privilege “accorded the motherhouse of having Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament daily from early morning until evening, and in the local houses the Blessed Sacrament is exposed for adoration two days each month.”94 This was a privilege not accorded to many other orders, and it was granted due to the insistence and personal influence of Katharine. The exposition of the Sacrament in the chapels of her missionary convents was extended throughout the years.

  As if all the time she spent in the chapel were not enough, Katharine spent hours at night in bed in what she notated as “NA,” for nocturnal adoration. “Oh my God, what things can I offer you for the permission to spend an hour of adoration in bed at night.” Her meditation notes contain many entries like the following:

  It is now 1:15 A.M. I have been on this NA since 11:15, about two hours. I shall say the Morning Offering and retire for the night!

  One hour and forty minutes over the NA.

  I looked at my watch and to my great surprise the hands of the watch say 10 to 3. The meditation was supposed to be from 1:10 to 2:10. I must stop at once.

  It is now 36 minutes over the hour of my NA. See how slow I am in contemplation.95

  She kept up this practice her entire life, but it was especially important after her third heart attack and retirement from active administration of the order in 1937.

  The adoration of the Eucharist either exposed or in the Tabernacle arose over time out of the piety of the people. The late medieval Church saw adoration of the Sacrament during Holy Week: “Forty hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament during Holy Week, especially during the Triduum, possibly existed in the Croatian city of Zara in the twelfth century.” Pope Urban IV promulgated the bull Transiturus in 1264 that established the Feast of Corpus Christi for the universal church. It was and remains a major feast day for the Church, bringing the attention of the faithful to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, thus making the consecrated Host itself worthy of adoration, for the Catholic Church teaches that it truly and substantially is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. “The Forty Hours devotion was established in Milan in 1537 with exposition throughout the year occurring in successive parishes.”96 St. Philip Neri introduced the practice of the forty hours devotion to Rome in the 1550s. Pope Paul III approved a petition soliciting indulgences for those who participated in the devotion; the devotion was officially approved by Pope Paul IV in 1560. St. John Neumann (d. 1860), archbishop of Philadelphia, introduced the Forty Hours Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament into the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. Given the intimate relationships that the Drexel family enjoyed with the priests and bishops of the Diocese of Philadelphia, it is not surprising that Katharine would cling to the Mass and the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as foundational to her apostolate and that of her order.

  Mary Heimann points out that, after the Mass, benediction of the Blessed Sacrament was the most popular Catholic devotion in England in the late nineteenth century.97 It was also an extremely important and popular devotion in the United States. At Old St. Joseph’s, the church where the teenaged Drexel daughters had taught catechism classes for young black children, there was benediction monthly, if not weekly. Benediction was celebrated for all the novenas, and, m
ost impressive of all, Old St. Joseph’s celebrated a “triple Benediction,” first at the Sacred Heart altar, then at the altar of Mary, and then at the main altar. According to Ann Taves, in the United States, “Benediction usually followed Vespers on Sundays and holy days. It was also celebrated during parish missions, sometimes as often as every day.”98 Old St. Joseph’s followed the same order. It had vespers on Sunday evening and a parish mission once a year. The parish mission at Old St. Joseph’s was held annually during Lent. “There were ‘instructions’ at the morning masses (beginning at 6:30 A.M., with two to three Masses throughout the day). There would be time for confessions.” As was common, each night focused on a different topic. There would be two nights for men and two nights designed for women. The great culmination and success of the parish mission would be the increased number of communicants on Easter morning.99 Parish missions were essential to Catholic revivalism in the nineteenth century in America, leading to an increase in personal piety and spiritualism of the type that can be seen in Katharine Drexel.100 The core of the Catholic revival movement was the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and its reception.

  Partaking of and adoring the Blessed Sacrament were the sources of the sisters’ love for African Americans and Native Americans. Sister Mary David Young, SBS, said of Mother Katharine, “I very often heard her say we really could not give what we didn’t have and that it was very important that we become as deeply religious as we possibly could be and that our love for these people must emanate from our love of the Blessed Sacrament.”101

  The Eucharist was the source not only of Christ’s love for the communicant and the communicant’s love for Christ, but also of the communicant’s love for others because of Christ. The Eucharist served a very practical function in the life of a missionary order of nuns and their founder. Katharine Drexel was always concerned for her sisters’ spiritual health. She insisted that they spend a minimum of two hours a day attending to their spiritual needs, including time spent in eucharistic adoration.

  He in the Blessed Sacrament follows you with His loving eyes when you leave the chapel for your charges and in them He watches the interior glance of your souls’ eyes lifted towards His dwelling there behind the little gold Tabernacle door — to see whether it begs sanctification for your labor for Him who is so full of eager desire to unite your labors to His so as to make them His very own. Where Christ lives in every action, is not the action by its participation become divine, holy? And our Lord’s Heart in that Tabernacle is in one sense bound until you draw this union with Him to the labor, to thus sanctify it.102

  When Katharine wrote her 1907 Christmas letter to her sisters at St. Michael’s, she stressed the unifying quality of Christ in the Eucharist.

  There is a Bethlehem in your chapel, where Jesus dwells as 1907 years ago — a manger where He really lies — the Tabernacle, and from that manger the priest will place Him on your tongue. He will abide with you — your heart too will be the manger. Keep Him with you; find Him in the representatives of Himself, the children He has placed under your care, find Him in the grown-up dusky creatures who will come to your door at Christmas; find Him in the hearts of your Sisters, and in the hearts of those children whom you have been instrumental in bringing to Baptism and the Holy Table. Thus Jesus will be praised and served by you everywhere and in all. I too will find Him in your hearts at the Midnight Mass and you will find Him in mine — let us adore Him together, place our hearts in His and thus they will be altogether one with Him and we will beg Him to keep them together in Him in time, in eternity.103

  In his remarks on the Catholic Church in the United States, Joseph P. Chinnici, OFM, wrote, “Frequent communion, nocturnal adoration, benediction, and visits to the Blessed Sacrament represented between 1895 and 1930 an ecclesiological vision. . . . The Prisoner in the Tabernacle was the one who made the Church, one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.”104

  It was more than an ecclesial vision for Katharine Drexel; it was a personal vision. This was the Church of which she would so happily proclaim of herself again and again, “Thank God . . . that I AM A CHILD OF THE CHURCH!”105 The devotional revival movement that came to eucharistic flower at the very end of the nineteenth century had as one of its exemplars Katharine Drexel, who loved the Church through her love of the Prisoner in the Tabernacle, her Lord who condescended to come to her in the consecrated eucharistic Host. Katharine lived her life in Christ kenotically and eucharistically. Her deep spirituality nurtured her through a long and difficult vocation as a living gift of self.

  Katharine’s spirituality is the key to understanding both her mission and her strength. She assiduously practiced kenosis. She emptied herself through mortification of the flesh, denying herself sustenance and causing herself pain. She emptied herself through the evangelical counsels of obedience, poverty, and chastity. She lived her vow to be as a mother to African Americans and Native Americans in ministering to them in a way that mirrored the motherhood of the Virgin Mary. She created the emptiness within herself, spiritually obliterating herself, so she could be filled by God, particularly as he is in the Eucharist. She consumed him and adored him within the Blessed Sacrament. She wanted and needed nothing but Jesus in the Sacrament. It was this kenotic and eucharistic spirituality that sustained her throughout her life as the missionary founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. The story of the development, growth, and recent decline of the order, as described in the previous chapter, serves as but a small part of her legacy. The next chapter will analyze what Pope John Paul II found compelling about Katharine Drexel, what he saw as the legacy of a remarkable woman, and why he upheld her as a beacon in the universal call to holiness.

  1. Albrecht Oepke, “Kenoō,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, 8th ed., vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), pp. 659-62.

  2. Kevin M. Cronin, OFM, Kenosis: Emptying Self and the Path of Christian Service (Rockport, Mass.: Element Books, 1992), p. 1.

  3. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1941), p. 327. See part 3, chapter 3, “The Unipersonality of Christ,” for a complete discussion.

  4. Quoted in John M. Drickamer, “Higher Criticism and the Incarnation in the Thought of I. A. Dorner,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 43, no. 3 (June 1979): 200. Also see Thomasius, “Against Dorner,” in God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century German Theology: G. Thomasius, I. A. Dorner, A. E. Biedermann, trans. and ed. Claude Welch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 89.

  5. Drickamer, quoting Schneider, without further reference or identification, “Higher Criticism and the Incarnation,” p. 200.

  6. See Sarah Coakley, “Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of ‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing,” in Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson (London: SPCK, 1996), pp. 82-111. The following are seminal works in feminist theology that address women and power within Christianity: Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1968); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (London: SCM, 1983); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (London: SCM, 1983); Letty M. Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective: A Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974); Letty M. Russell, Becoming Human (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982).

  7. MKD, Meditation Slips, 11, pp. 4-5, July 1943.

  8. Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 153-55; Daphne Hampson, After Christianity (London: SCM, 1996), pp. 141-46.

  9. Hampson, After Christianity, p. 141.

  10. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, pp. 137-38, 207.

  11. Coakley, “Kenosis and Subversion,” pp. 82-83. “Whoever find
s his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39).