Saint of the day: Saint Katharine Drexel
Saint of the day: Saint Katharine Drexel: If your father is an international banker and you travel in a private railroad car, you are unlikely to be dragged into a life of voluntary poverty. But if your mother opens your home to the poor three days a week and your father spends half an hour every night in prayer, it's not impossible that you dedicate your life to the poor and donate millions of dollars. Katharine Drexel did it.
Born in Philadelphia in 1858, she had an excellent education and traveled extensively. As a rich girl, Katharine also had a great debut in society. But when she treated her stepmother during a three-year terminal illness, she saw that all of Drexel's money couldn't buy safety from pain or death, and her life took a profound turn.
Katharine has always been interested in the plight of the Indians, having been shocked by what she read in Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor. On a European tour, he met Pope Leo XIII and asked him to send more missionaries to Wyoming for his friend, Bishop James O'Connor. The pope replied: "Why don't you become a missionary?" His answer shocked her to consider new possibilities.
Saint of the day: Saint Katharine Drexel 3 March
Back home, Katharine visited the Dakotas, met the Sioux leader Red Cloud, and began her systematic aid to the Indian missions.
Katharine Drexel could have easily married. But after much discussion with Bishop O'Connor, in 1889 he wrote: "The feast of St. Joseph brought me the grace to give the rest of my life to the Indians and the colored ones." The headlines screamed "Give up seven million!"
After three and a half years of training, Mother Drexel and her first group of nuns, the Sisters of Blessed Sacrament for Indians and blacks, they opened a boarding school in Santa Fe. A series of foundations followed. By 1942 it had a black Catholic school system in 13 states, as well as 40 missionary centers and 23 rural schools. Segregationists harassed his work, even burning down a school in Pennsylvania. In all, he established 50 missions for Indians in 16 states.
Two saints met when Mother Drexel was advised by Mother Cabrini about the "politics" to obtain the approval of the Rule of her Order in Rome. Its culmination is the founding of Xavier University in New Orleans, the first Catholic university in the United States for African Americans.
At 77, mother Drexel suffered a heart attack and is forced to retire. Apparently his life was over. But now nearly 20 years of silent and intense prayer have arrived from a small room overlooking the sanctuary. Small notebooks and sheets of paper record his various prayers, incessant aspirations and meditations. She died at 96 and was canonized in 2000.
Saint of the day, reflection
The saints have always said the same thing: pray, be humble, accept the cross, love and forgive. But it's nice to hear these things in the American idiom from someone who, for example, got her ears pierced as a teenager, who decided not to have "no cake, no preserves", who was wearing a watch, was interviewed by the press , he was traveling by train and could take care of the right tube size for a new mission. These are evident references to the fact that holiness can be lived in today's culture as well as in that of Jerusalem or Rome.