19th–20th century
Feast: March 3
One of the richest women in America asked the Pope what to do about racial injustice — he told her to do it herself. She spent $20 million and founded 145 missions.
Katharine Drexel inherited a fortune so large that her annual income alone was worth millions in today's money. Her father was a Philadelphia banker, and she grew up in a world of servants and society balls. But when she traveled west and saw the conditions on Native American reservations, something shifted. She began funding schools and missions. During an audience with Pope Leo XIII, she asked him to send missionaries to help Black and Indigenous Americans. The Pope looked at her and said, 'Why not become a missionary yourself?' She did. She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891 and spent the next sixty years pouring her inheritance into building schools in some of the most hostile parts of the American South. She founded Xavier University of Louisiana — the only historically Black Catholic university in the country. In rural communities, her schools were firebombed. The Ku Klux Klan threatened her sisters. Katharine kept building. She spent virtually her entire fortune — roughly $20 million over her lifetime — on education for Black and Native communities. After a stroke at seventy-seven, she spent her last twenty years in quiet prayer. She died in 1955 at ninety-six, having given away everything.