St. Katharine Drexel
An heiress who gave away twenty million dollars, one school at a time.
Katharine's father was a Philadelphia banker, and when he died she and her sisters inherited a fortune that would be worth hundreds of millions today. She was expected to marry well and host things.
Instead she went to see Pope Leo XIII and asked him to send missionaries to the Native American and Black communities in the United States. He looked at her and asked why she did not do it herself.
So she did. She became a nun, and over the next sixty years she spent nearly her entire inheritance building schools where children were being refused an education, including Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historically Black Catholic university in the country. She kept almost nothing.
St. Katharine Drexel facts for kids
- She inherited roughly $20 million in 1885 money
- The Pope told her to do the job herself, and she did
- She founded Xavier University of Louisiana in 1925
- She opened almost 60 schools and kept none of the money
Feast day: March 3 · Patron of racial justice and philanthropists
Proper to the calendar of the United States.
St. Katharine, help me use what I have on somebody who needs it.