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By Priscilla Greear, Staff Writer
ATLANTA—As St. Katharine Drexel was canonized in Rome, the
community of Our Lady of Lourdes School and Church gathered Oct. 1 to celebrate
this honor given to the sister who founded Lourdes and over 65 other schools
for blacks and Native Americans.
The canonization came 88 years to the day after Our Lady of
Lourdes School opened as the first private school for blacks in Atlanta.
About 450 Lourdes alumni, some wearing pins with their graduation
year, current students and parents and Lourdes parishioners came together for
an outdoor celebration outside the church and school on Boulevard. The Mass was
held hours after the canonization in Rome and was celebrated by Archbishop John
F. Donoghue. The canonization ceremony in Rome also included 120 Chinese
martyrs, Sister Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese slave, and Sister Maria Josefa
Sancho de Guerra, a Spaniard who founded a religious order.
As the sunshine reflected St. Katharine’s shining example,
some in the gathering talked about her like a dear family member, whether they
had known her personally or not. The saint, who lived from 1858 to 1955, was a
Philadelphia debutante who opted for another type of high society.
She used a $15 million inheritance from her father, an investment
banker and philanthropist, to found elementary and secondary schools in 23
states for African-Americans and Native Americans, who suffered from poverty,
racism and lack of educational opportunities. To carry out her teaching
apostolate, she founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891. The order
now includes 225 nuns who run over 40 schools and ministry sites in 13 states,
including the Maisha House of Prayer in Atlanta. She also founded Xavier
University in New Orleans in 1915, which became a leading school for blacks in
the segregated South and is the only historically African-American Catholic
university in the U.S.
Emily Milner, 82, was one alumna whose childhood course was
charted by St. Katharine and her sisters. After her parents died, she came to
Atlanta and attended Lourdes from 1929-33. The nuns sent Milner to boarding
school for three years at their motherhouse in Philadelphia, where she was an
honor student and went on monthly field trips. Milner said that visits with
Katharine Drexel, the “debutante nun,” were always laced with
excitement.
“She asked questions—how we were doing in school, how
was school that year,” Milner recalled. “Most of the time as you
would see her she would be coming into the chapel ... When you got to talk to
her, you just thought you were talking to a walking saint. She was a lovely
person; she always had a lovely, kind word. (She’d say,) ‘Hi, my
girls.’ ... She loved her children.”
In the Lourdes Mass program, which included personal memories of
St. Katharine, Milner recalled the last time she saw her, which was in 1936, in
a wheelchair.
“One day we commenced to run up to her, and the nuns shooed
us away. Mother Katharine then told the nuns to let us come over and speak with
her.”
Because of the size of the event, the Mass was celebrated outdoors
under a white tent, with standing room only. Passing beneath an archway of
balloons, and carrying banners, representatives of parish ministries entered in
procession. Dr. Kevin Johnson, music director, and cantors Janis Griffin and
Celeste Johnson led the congregation in song, including “When the Saints
Go Marching In.”
Standing in front of her portrait, Archbishop Donoghue spoke of
St. Katharine’s mission.
“She was a woman filled with the Holy Spirit—filled with
love for Jesus Christ—and completely dedicated to doing his work in this
world. And so she did not waste her money on herself. Instead, she took it, and
gave it to people who needed it most,” he said.
Her faith was established in childhood, where she grew up in a
mansion in which she was taught that wealth was to be shared. She and a sister
helped their stepmother frequently serve the poor and they taught at a Sunday
school she founded. St. Katharine was educated by tutors and her parents took
her on tours of Europe and North America. On one trip to the Northwest she saw
the suffering of Native Americans on reservations and was stirred to help them.
At 21 her stepmother fell ill with cancer and she spent three
years nursing her, and began contemplating religious life. While her first
preference was for a cloistered life, her spiritual director, Bishop James
O’Connor, encouraged her to practice prayer by founding a religious order
for Indians and blacks. After visiting more reservations and black communities,
at 33 she took her vow of poverty as the first Blessed Sacrament sister.
In 1912 St. Katharine accepted the invitation of Father Ignatius
Lissner, provincial of the Society of African Missions, to help him found
Atlanta’s first Catholic church for blacks. Donating $12,000 for building
construction, she co-founded Our Lady of Lourdes Parish and elementary school.
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament staffed the school from 1913 to 1974 and other
religious orders and lay teachers have also served there.
“(This) was perhaps one of the first, if not the first time,
that anyone in Atlanta turned their attention and resources to helping the poor
children of these neighborhoods,” the archbishop said. “They opened a
school, and because of their work, and because of the tremendous inspiration
and strength that flowed from the Spirit who was in St. Katharine Drexel, the
school is still here, still serving children—but even more, still
standing, for so many in this area, as a beacon of hope.”
The enduring quality of Lourdes “reminds us all, that with
the power of God, with the love of our Lord, with the intercession of our
Blessed Mother and all the Saints, miracles can and do happen, great things can
and do occur, and the future, which may be unknown, can still be made better by
the work we do today,” he said.
The archbishop said challenging work lies ahead, along with many
rewards, for they too must be saints.
“St. Katharine is reaching down again today ... and saying to
us all, ‘Come children, let us get up and go into the fields of the Lord.
For there is much work to be done, and much happiness to be got, and I am going
with you, to help you all that I can,’” he said. “... May the
great merit of her life be turned now in our direction, as we strive to live up
to her standard, and to live by the power which moved her so mightily—the
power of Christ’s love in our midst.”
The spiritual fuel for St. Katharine’s zealous service was
her love of the Eucharist. After suffering several heart attacks at 77, which
forced her to give up her apostolate, she spent the next 20 years in daily Mass
and prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. Reflecting that devotion, Lourdes held
adoration of the Blessed Sacrament for 24 hours preceding the ceremony.
Before the eucharistic feast, girls wearing black leotards and
skirts carefully swirled through the aisles in a liturgical dance while
students in summer uniform lined up for the archbishop’s blessing. The
children’s choir sang “This Little Light of Mine” and “I
Love You, Lord,” which moved the congregation to give a standing ovation.
Father John Adamski, pastor of the 350-family parish, spoke of the
rainy canonization ceremony held in St. Peter’s Square, at which Pope John
Paul II presided and which over 3,000 U.S. pilgrims attended. The parish
contributed $5,000 so that Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament Loretta McCarthy
and Nancy Auster, who staff Maisha House, could make the pilgrimage.
In 1988 the Vatican beatified Katharine Drexel after determining
that she, who seemed to hear God perfectly herself, interceded on behalf of a
boy who was miraculously healed of deafness. Last January her cause for
sainthood was expedited after another miraculous healing of a child’s
hearing was attributed to her intercession.
Leslye Colvin, a Catholic and graduate of Xavier University who is
a ceremonial document writer in the mayor’s office, presented a
proclamation to Lourdes principal John Mayer on behalf of Mayor Bill Campbell
declaring Oct. 1 “St. Katharine Drexel Day.”
The text commended her for moving beyond society’s limited
expectations of her in order to serve according to her faith and found an order
“to work for social justice through prayer, counseling, education, health
care, social work and other corporal and spiritual works of mercy.” It
said that her legacy continues through Lourdes, through her order and through
all who work for justice and peace.
After the Mass, people visited the school, which was decorated
with students’ drawings of the saint, including a number depicting
Katharine as a black woman, as the school now has a sister from Africa. Student
essays to her lined the walls. A third-grader’s read, “Thank you for
founding our school ... I think you did a nice thing for the Indians and
blacks.”
Milner, too, once wrote essays to St. Katharine at Lourdes, as the
saint spent most of every year traveling to all her schools. And Milner learned
valuable lessons in those rooms.
“I think that’s where I got my faith—in school from
the sisters ... I appreciate everything they taught me ... This is the only
(private) school the black children could go to—Protestant and Catholic.
We had more Protestant than Catholic,” she said. “I always knew the
sisters loved us and they always were nice to us and took care of us ... This
is where my background is. I was baptized over here, first Communion here. I
married here, my children went to school here.”
“I imagine she’s smiling down on us to know that her
children are still thinking about her,” Milner said. “She was a saint
before she became a saint.”
Alumna Mary Mize also shared merry memories for the program.
“She would show us how to get in line and how to sit and stand up straight
... Whenever Mother Drexel came to the school, we had to dress up in our best
clothes,” she said. “She often told us that God came first, then your
mother and father, and she then would ask who came next. We would begin to call
out the names of family members and friends, and she would then say, ‘What
about your teacher?’”
Adele Summerhour, 97, a teacher for 30 years, brought history to
life as alumni greeted their former third-grade teacher. Distinguished in a red
suit and hat with a feather, she recalled how St. Katharine, who paid all the
lay teachers’ salaries, would visit teachers and observe classes.
“She would come and visit the classes and everybody would be
extra careful and behave extra proper. She was a pleasant person,” she
said. “She complimented me and I stayed here 30 years ... They liked my
work and really encouraged me to go on teaching and I said yes to them.”
Karen Allen, a lifelong parishioner and 1959 graduate who compiled
the program, seemed to know the saint in spirit. “She made the blacks and
the Indians feel special and feel important and she made them feel that they
were not second class citizens. That was one of the most important things a
person could have done during that time,” she said.
“The people looked at us strange (before) integration and the
sisters were all white, but the children that attended the school here in the
black community they looked at this as very positive,” she said. “I
loved it ... I felt like a special person. They were very strict. I didn’t
ever remember having had discipline problems, but we attended Mass every
morning before we started the school day and I think that helped a lot with
prayer ... We had more belonging. We felt ownership in this place.”
Lourdes was a safe haven from a frightening society, which forced
her to sit in the back of the bus going home after school, she said.
“By going to Lourdes, I didn’t feel racism. It seemed
like (I felt it) when I (got) let out of this place going into other parts of
the city. We couldn’t go to certain places ... I felt racism when I got
into town to transfer (to other buses) to go home. This was a safe place for
me.”
Father Adamski spoke of St. Katharine’s pioneering piety and
“her initiative and her determination at a time when women’s roles
were pretty well-defined.”
“While she worked in a traditional context as a Religious
woman, she was really out there, in a sense, across the country in establishing
those missions and schools ... These were not things that people wanted to pay
attention to. She really was ahead of her time within the church and within
society,” he said. “She was concerned to give of herself for the sake
of the needs that she saw around her and that’s an encouragement to us to
give of ourselves in service.”
The saint’s work inspired former superintendent of schools
Sandra Smith, Ph.D., who joined Lourdes after moving to Atlanta in 1996 and who
worked for 40 years in Catholic education.
“One of the reasons I selected OLL as a parish was the
historic role in the community. OLL historically was the black church in
Atlanta, founded in 1912 for black persons and with it came the school ... At
that time OLL was the only non-public school black kids could go to. For that
reason we’ve always had a large non-Catholic population ... OLL has always
been special to me.”
Smith said the saint’s generosity was “so
outstanding” that she also financed many schools which she lacked sisters
to staff. And she never educated minorities as if they were second class
citizens, Smith said.
“Her schools were never exclusive; she accepted all, of all
religions; only the best in materials and furnishings were good enough for her
schools ... Whether it was Xavier University or one of the elementary schools
that she founded, she always was committed to quality education for those who
may not receive it otherwise.”
One of the most enduring ways she challenged the church on racial
justice was by her collaboration with Father John LaFarge, SJ, in founding an
interracial apostolate. This effort coalesced in 1959 as the National Catholic
Conference for Interracial Justice, which mobilized Catholics to march in
Selma, Ala., in 1965, Smith added. “At the time she founded the Sisters of
the Blessed Sacrament she raised her voice on behalf of ‘Indians and
colored people’ to bishops, priests, Religious and laity in the church as
well as to the secular world of politicians, media and others,” she said.
“Her mission was partly one of evangelization, but it was also essentially
one of social justice.”
Lourdes graduate Carolyn Meadows, a 16-year faculty member and
lead teacher for the past five years, strives to carry on that dream of social
justice. She believes St. Katharine is proud of Lourdes, which has a
comprehensive curriculum and has become more racially diverse and middle class.
“Having attended school (here) and having had an opportunity
to come back here and work here, I feel as if I’m also on a path to follow
what she dreamed of for the children ... Our community is very diverse ... She
is a person who fought for social justice. I think OLL is certainly a role
model for all in terms of her dream,” she said.
Students help at Mass, learn social justice, observe St.
Katharine’s feast day and ask for her intercession, which students can be
heard doing before tests.
“We teach children to stand up for what is right. She is very
proud of us. The sunshine today is a sign from her, showing her approval for
what our children have done and continue to do in the classroom,” she
said. “They’re taught how to carry on some of what she stood for in
their own faith and spirituality as they grow and develop in the Catholic
faith.”
“Some people didn’t believe in us during segregation,
but she did. Our name started very, very strong in the community. It has a
strong sense of community. Graduates send their children back because it’s
a tradition and I think that would be a wonderful fulfillment of her dream to
know a school established 88 years ago is still going and the mission is still
being carried out,” Meadows said. “It’s been a really proud
moment for me as a graduate to have experienced today ... The school opened
Oct. 1, 1912 and today is Oct. 1, 2000. That captures it all. We celebrate her
as a saint.” |
