Life and Religious Work
Katharine Mary Drexel was born Catherine Marie Drexel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 26, 1858, to Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth. Her family owned a considerable banking fortune, and her uncle Anthony Joseph Drexel was the founder of Drexel University in Philadelphia. She had two natural sisters, Louise and Elizabeth. She was a distant cousin of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on her father's side.
She took religious vows, and took the name Mother Katharine, dedicating herself and her inheritance to the needs of oppressed Native Americans and African-Americans in the western and southwestern United States, and was a vocal advocate of racial tolerance. Joined by 13 other women, she then established a religious congregation, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to further this cause. She also financed more than 60 missions and schools around the United States, as well as the founding of Xavier University of Louisiana – the only historically Black, Roman Catholic university in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Katharine Drexel
Famous quotes containing the words life, religious and/or work:
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is the reason that women servants ... have much lower wages than men servants ... when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male?”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)