Saint Katharine Drexel was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States of America, on 26 November 1858. She was the second daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth. Her father was a well-known banker and philanthropist. Both parents instilled in their daughters the idea that their wealth was simply loaned to them and was to be shared with others.
During a trip to the Western part of the United States, Katharine, as a young woman, saw the sufferings of the Indian-Americans destitute. This experience aroused her desire to do something specific to help alleviate their condition. This was the beginning of her lifelong personal and financial support of numerous missions and missionaries in the United States.
She established St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1887). Later, when visiting Pope Leo XIII in Rome, and asking him for missionaries to staff some of the Indian missions that she as a layperson was financing, she was surprised to hear the Pope suggest that she become a missionary herself. After consultation with her spiritual director, Bishop James O’Connor, she made the decision to give herself totally to God, along with her inheritance, through service to American Indians and Afro-Americans.
She spent all her wealth on the poor and needy. On February 12, 1891, she professed her first vows as a religious, founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament whose dedication would be to share the message of the Gospel and the life of the Eucharist among American Indians and Afro-Americans.
She acquired power from the deep devotion in Eucharist. She always stayed against racism. Knowing that many Afro-Americans were far from free, still living in substandard conditions as sharecroppers or underpaid menials, denied education and constitutional rights enjoyed by others, she felt a compassionate urgency to help change racial attitudes in the United States.
The plantation at that time was an entrenched social institution in which the coloured people continued to be victims of oppression. This was a deep affront to Katharine’s sense of justice. The need for quality education loomed before her, and she discussed this need with some who shared her concern about the inequality of education for Afro-Americans in the cities.
Religious education, social service, visiting in homes, in hospitals, and in prisons were also included in the ministries of Katharine and the Sisters. In her quiet way, Katharine combined prayerful and total dependence on Divine Providence with determined activism. She always raised her voice against injustice and racism in society.
For the last 18 years of her life, she was rendered almost completely immobile because of a serious illness. During these years she gave herself to a life of adoration and contemplation as she had desired from early childhood.