Katharine Drexel: The Rags-to-Riches Story of an American Catholic Saint is a biography with a purpose. Cheryl C. D. Hughes explains on the volume's very first page that she wants to “uncover, as much as possible, her [Drexel's] mystery, those personal, intellectual, and religious motivations that helped her to become a saint” (1). Popes, including John Paul II, canonize men and women for a reason, and the question Hughes asks is: what did John Paul II want to teach us by “canonizing this particular American women” (1)?
The structure of Katharine Drexel is designed to answer Hughes's question. The first three chapters focus on the life and work of Mother Katharine Drexel, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People—today they refer to themselves as the Sister of the Blessed Sacrament—in 1891. Chapter 1 focuses on Drexel's early life as the second of three daughters in one of Philadelphia's wealthiest families. Raised as a devout, practicing Catholic by her father and stepmother (her biological mother died when she was very young), the young Katharine was taught to understand that the wealthy were responsible for helping to meet the needs of those who suffered from a lack of basic material comforts. Drexel experienced the deaths of both her parents in her twenties; her father's death left the three Drexel sisters among the wealthiest women in the United States.
Despite her wealth, Drexel spent a number of years discerning whether she had a vocation to religious life. In chapter 2, Hughes details her continuing conversation, which took the form of a lengthy correspondence, with her spiritual director, James O'Connor, a Philadelphia priest who had been appointed Bishop of Omaha. “His motivation for being involved with her and the discernment of her vocation,” Hughes writes, “was never made explicit in any of his writings” (67). During the course of their correspondence, Katharine Drexel became more and more convinced that she wanted to use her fortune to assist Native Americans and African Americans. Chapter 3 examines the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, paying special attention to the forty-three years that Drexel was actively involved in the community's governance. Hughes discusses Mother Katharine's decision to exclude women of color from the congregation, and highlights several of the more important schools and missions founded by Drexel, including Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historical black college in the United States.
Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to Drexel's spirituality and canonization. Describing Drexel's spirituality as both kenotic (self-emptying) and Eucharistic, Hughes explains that it was this “continuing, lived effort to hear the word of God and to be docile to his Spirit” that sustained Drexel as a Sister of the Blessed Sacrament. The chapter contains a very detailed discussion of kenotic spirituality and the ways in which Drexel practiced this way of relating to God, including her use of mortification and the living out of her religious vows. Drexel's devotion to the Eucharist, according to Hughes, is what drew John Paul II to examine her canonization cause, and ultimately proclaim Katharine Drexel a saint. Hughes contends that as the founder of a congregation of women religious, Katharine Drexel was “a very traditional candidate for canonization (248),” but John Paul II believed Drexel served as an example for Americans, Catholics and non-Catholics, as someone who gave up “wealth, social power, and position to make a holy gift for herself in the service of others” (250).
Those who are unfamiliar with Katharine Drexel's story will find a basic account of her life in Hughes's account. The volume, however, is not a critical comprehensive biography. Only one chapter, for instance, is devoted to Drexel's life after she founded the Sisters of Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, but she lived as a woman religious—not a wealthy heiress/philanthropist—from 1891 until her death in 1955, some forty-four years later.
Hughes did not access any available sources located in either the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Center for Historical Research or Marquette University, two important repositories for those studying either Katharine Drexel or Philadelphia Catholicism. Utilizing the Bureau of Catholic Indian Mission Records housed at Marquette, for instance, would have given the author a chance to help readers better understand Drexel's work with those Catholics interested in ministering to Native Americans. In addition, Hughes claims that Drexel struggled with anorexia and clinical depression. Several scholars have claimed that some women considered holy by many were actually suffering from anorexia; others have vehemently argued against this idea. There is no evidence in Hughes's bibliography or text that she considered any of the work related to this topic, or that she accessed any secondary sources on the subject of clinical depression.
Katharine Drexel is an adequate introduction to Hughes's subject, but it is not the critical study of the Philadelphia heiress who devoted her life to African Americans and Native Americans that we need. That volume remains to be written.
