Religion: For the Tenth Man

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A textbook engraving of Christopher Columbus discovering America would excite no special curiosity in most small girls, Victorian or modern. But one blue-eyed, chestnut-haired Philadelphia child gazed at it during the late 1860'sand wondered. What about those red Indians peeping through the forest at the white man? What about their souls?

Pretty Mary Katharine Drexel never forgot about those Indians. Her father Francis Anthony Drexel was busy helping build up the banking fortune started by his father, Anthony Joseph Drexel, but he found time, at the behest of Emma Bouvier, his French second wife, to embrace Roman Catholicism and to bring up his daughters Elizabeth, "Kate," and Louise in quiet piety. Small Daughter Kate he took to see the Pope, and in the early 1880's to Tacoma, Wash, where she secretly gave $100 from her dress allowance for a statue of the Blessed Virgin in an Indian mission. In trepidation she confessed, but her father approved, in a manner quite unlike that of the bad Victorian father of Elsie Dinsmore. In 1883 Banker Drexel died, leaving Kate the income from some $6,000,000.

Katharine Drexel's Uncle Anthony J. ("Dandy Tony") became an international figure, fond of expensive yachts. Cousin Margaretta married the impoverished Viscount Maidstone (now Earl of Winchilsea & Nottingham). Cousin Anthony J. Jr. espoused Marjorie Gould, daughter of gay George Jay and niece of another pious socialite, Helen Gould (Mrs. Finley Johnson Shepard). Other Drexels were much in the world. Not so the daughters of Francis Anthony. Katharine read Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor, toured the West with Elizabeth to find out how Indians were cared for. She found things even worse than the book had indicated. To better them she began by building a wooden chapel-school in the Indian Territory for the Osages. When a cyclone wrecked it she built another, then founded a dozen Indian boarding schools in the far West. Katharine Drexel planned an order devoted to the Indians, learned she must first undergo the usual convent discipline In 1889 she pledged her entire income to the Roman Catholic Church (estimated at $1,000 a day, it is exempt from Federal Income Tax by special Act of Congress in 1924) and entered the Pittsburgh Sisters of Mercy as a postulant.

In 1891, her final vows completed, Katharine Drexel founded with the Pope's approval the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and became their Superior General. She took over the old Drexel house at Torresdale, Pa., later built a motherhouse at Cornwells Heights near Philadelphia. The Sisterhood's motto: "God's greatest work on earth is man. Man's master art is the leading of man to God." There are now 320 sisters. 41 foundations in 18 States. But Indians were not their only concern. Mother Katharine Drexel looked out from her cloister upon what she called "America's tenth man," and resolved upon a campaign for the education and conversion of the nation's 12,000,000 Negroes. Among her many foundations were an industrial school for Negro girls at Nashville, Tenn., the Holy Providence House for Negro children at Cornwells.