Cordelia Biddle’s ‘Saint Katharine’

The outlines of Katharine Drexel’s long life (1858-1955) are by now well known. She belonged to the third generation of a Philadelphia dynasty that by the 1870s had become the most important banking house in the United States and perhaps the world. Yet in 1889 — the dawn of America’s Gilded Age — Katharine stunned her family and her social circle by rejecting her fortune for the spartan regime of a nun.

Thanks to Katharine’s unique combination of dedication, shrewdness, wealth, and managerial skills, the order she founded and supervised subsequently launched some 60 missions and schools for two of America’s most despised and neglected groups — blacks and Native Americans — including Xavier University in New Orleans. Beyond her own order, to which she funneled her entire income from her father’s trust (some $20 million all told), Katharine became in effect a one-woman foundation for bishops or priests seeking money to build or staff schools for Indians or blacks. (During one 12-year period in the late 19th century, Katharine annually gave more to Catholic institutions than her 12 million fellow American Catholics combined.)

Almost a Quaker

But Katharine’s wealth and intelligence were exceeded by her extraordinary courage. When her order opened a school for blacks in Beaumont, Texas, in 1922, a delegation of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen rode up on horses, threatening to burn the school down. Mother Katharine came outside and confronted them — “No, we will not leave,” she said — and began to pray. The Klansmen backed off.

Yet Katharine Drexel’s life also abounds in ironies that are rarely discussed. For instance:

• From St. Sebastian to Joan of Arc, the lives of Catholic saints, like the life of Jesus himself, were typically characterized by persecution, suffering, and agonizing martyrdom at an early age. Katharine Drexel, by contrast, was an indefatigably upbeat pragmatist who achieved virtually all of her earthly goals and died in bed at 96.
• Katharine’s birth mother, Hannah Langstroth Drexel, was not a Catholic but a Dunkard, a liberal sect whose beliefs fell somewhere between Baptists and Quakers. Because the Drexel men tended to follow their wives on religious matters, Katharine’s Catholic father, Francis A. Drexel, had largely fallen away from the church by the time Katharine was born. Had Hannah Drexel not died after delivering Katharine, and had Francis Drexel not subsequently remarried the devoutly Catholic Emma Bouvier, Katharine might well have grown up a Quaker rather than a Catholic.
• Katharine was the only member of her Drexel generation to demonstrate any financial acumen or business instincts. Had she lived in a gender-blind world, she might have succeeded her uncle and mentor, Anthony J. Drexel, as the driving force behind Drexel & Co. But in 1889, the church was one of the few institutions where an ambitious woman could find an outlet for her entrepreneurial talents — and, indeed, the nationwide network of missions and schools that Katharine created was modeled after her Uncle Tony’s international banking network.
• In material terms, the austere life of a nun represented a great sacrifice for an upper-class woman. Yet Victorian women, especially upper-class women, actually enjoyed more control over their lives in convents than in marriage. Another famous 19th-century lady bountiful, the beautiful Jewish Philadelphian Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869), rejected marriage precisely in order to devote her life to philanthropy. But Judaism provided no institutional outlet for a single woman like Rebecca Gratz. The church’s convent hierarchy, by contrast, offered Katharine Drexel an infrastructure through which she could direct her philanthropic energies effectively — surely more effectively at that time than had she been a Quaker, or a banker, or Jewish, or a man.

Worshipful tones

Anyone fascinated by such questions, and anyone interested in discovering the flesh-and-blood woman beneath the icon, is likely to be disappointed by the existing literature about Katharine Drexel. The four, full-length biographies published so far, beginning with Katherine Burton’s Golden Door in 1957, tend to exude a worshipful tone best suited for sermons rather than historical works. (None of them, for instance, explores the ironies I’ve mentioned above.)

Lou Baldwin’s Saint Katharine Drexel (2000), the most detached of the four, does attempt to analyze Katharine Drexel in the context of other dedicated social reformers and readily acknowledges that her impact “is difficult to say.” Ultimately, though, Baldwin too falls back on religious rhetoric, e.g., “The essence of Katharine Drexel was a pure and never-diminishing love of God that manifested itself through a particular devotion to Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament” — which says little to Muslims, Jews, or atheists who might appreciate Katharine Drexel as a fellow human.

Mother Katharine’s canonization will further complicate the search for the real Katharine Drexel. It’s tough to write objectively about a saint, especially when the market demands genuflection.

Reading people's minds

The latest entry in the Katharine Drexel sweepstakes, Cordelia Biddle’s Saint Katharine, has much to recommend it. As a novelist, Biddle benefits from an interest in what transpires inside people’s heads, and as a relative of Katharine Drexel (her first cousin, thrice removed), she presumably benefits from her proximity to Drexel family lore passed down over three generations.

Saint Katharine is especially strong in the context it provides. Biddle vividly reminds us that blacks and Native Americans in Katharine Drexel’s day were widely treated not merely with neglect but with outright hostility (the Wounded Knee massacre occurred just after Katharine took the veil). She cites Sidney George Fisher’s 1860 defense of slavery as a telling example of the genteel racism of Philadelphia’s upper classes. She discusses the changing roles of women in the late 19th century, and her equally vivid picture of the excessive luxuries of the Gilded Age dramatizes why Kate Drexel’s family and friends were so stunned by her rejection of their supposedly good life.

Unfortunately, Biddle’s artistic license too often gets the best of her, leading her to surmise people’s thoughts or feelings without supporting evidence. When Kate’s father dies, Biddle reports, “All Kate could do was stare and stare at her father’s lifeless body….Everything lost meaning for her; everything seemed hopeless.” On another occasion, Biddle writes, “Aching for answers, she prayed, her body taut with confusion.” During a crisis, she tells us, “Mother Mary of the Visitation was sick with fear.” Although Biddle’s book is extensively annotated, none of these journeys inside people’s minds is attributed.

Marriage proposal

Many of Biddle’s characterizations are similarly unsupported. She describes Katharine’s grandfather, Francis Martin Drexel — by most accounts a footloose, insecure, combative, peripatetic vagabond portrait painter who traipsed around three continents before turning to banking at age 45 — as “shrewd, iron-willed, brilliant in his fiscal speculations and calculations.” She describes Katharine’s uncle and aunt, Anthony and Ellen Drexel, as “fun-loving”; but Anthony’s grandson Livingston Biddle — Cordelia Biddle’s own grandfather — once likened this couple to statues: “cold, stern and relentlessly formal.” Biddle contends that Anthony Drexel was “deeply embarrassed” by his lack of formal education; in fact, he received a rigorous education at home, which was typical of affluent families in the 1830s, as Biddle acknowledges a few pages later.

Most curious is Biddle’s unsupported contention that young Kate had “no dearth of gentleman admirers” before she took the veil. Maybe so, but more likely such admirers may have been figments of Kate’s imagination. For centuries prior to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, unmarried women often invented some cover story — a fiancé killed in war, a heart broken by a cad, guilt over a libertine past — to explain the absence of men in their lives. John Fowles, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, devoted an entire novel to one such Victorian woman, and the sexually repressed Gwen French in James Jones’s novel Some Came Running — set in Illinois in the late 1940s — is another such character.

Biddle mentions a conveniently anonymous suitor who supposedly proposed marriage to Kate Drexel in 1883, only to be rejected. Yet the sole source of this information consists of letters Kate wrote to a conveniently distant confidant, Bishop James O’Connor of Omaha. Biddle herself trots out several reasons why “it’s hard to believe” Kate could have entertained a suitor without her family’s knowledge — then says she believes it anyway.

Committed atheist

By the end of the book — whose chapters bear titles like “His Steadfast Grace and Love” and “Sit Still Often In the Presence of God” — Biddle has cast aside all pretense of objectivity, leaving readers with not so much a biography as a hymnal. Of the sisters in Katharine’s order, Biddle reports, “Zeal carried them forward. . . .The air crackled with enthusiasm. . . .They were intrepid, courageous, and single-mindedly devoted.” These comments will surely comfort the faithful but provide little insight to non-Catholics who might seek to emulate Katharine Drexel’s life.

What ultimately drove Katharine Drexel? To Lou Baldwin, the answer lies in Jesus’s injunction to serve “these least brothers of mine,” which Katharine took to mean Native Americans and African Americans. A similar purpose was embraced by John Lovejoy Elliott (1868-1942), a social activist and humanist who, much like Kate Drexel, committed his life to helping New York City’s underclass. But Elliott — a confirmed atheist — was inspired to do good works not by religious belief but by a sincere belief in people.

Katharine Drexel was a visionary who used her faith to achieve her vision. Catholicism ideally served her purposes and vice versa. But altruistic visionaries can be found in every religion and (as Elliott’s example attests) in no religion at all. For all that has been said and written about Katharine Drexel, a sophisticated examination of her life remains to be produced. But how many people do you suppose would buy such a book?

Dan Rottenberg is the author of The Man Who Made Wall Street (2001), a biography of Anthony J. Drexel.