DeGoubeau Lecture, January 30, 2003
St. Thomas More Catholic Center, Yale University

Unbeknownst to most Catholics, women in the Church were often the ones who tackled systemic social changes on behalf of the poor and those discriminated against.  They also tackled what we would call economic development in poor neighborhoods before that term was invented.

I wish I had known more about these saints before I began what we might biblically call my public life.  Instead of teaching my generation about the Catholic women who took the world by storm and refused to let injustices remain the fate of the poor and disadvantaged, the Church tended to focus on making us admire females like St. Maria Goretti. She was canonized, I was told, because she refused to do something that no one explained specifically. In fact, she was stabbed to death for refusing to do it. If we were supposed to follow her example, we certainly did not know what to do (or not to do). It must have been something terrible though. It seems that sexual purity trumped the care of the poor in the mind of the Church at the time. However, I have never found a time in the Gospels when Christ made that choice.  Goretti was hard to emulate if you did not know what she said no to.  No matter she was brave and pure whatever that exactly meant.  Euphemisms are often lost on youth —subtleties too.  St. Therese of Lisieux was another favorite female held up to young women in my day.  She followed the Little Way — perfect and she was — she didn’t take up a lot of space in life — didn’t upset any apple carts — she retired to a littler and littler way and was sainted almost immediately.  There is probably a lesson there I was meant to learn and emulate.  St. Agnes was another woman saint, patron of virgins and girl scouts, perhaps predictably.  She had at 13 decided to reject the Roman Governor’s son’s advances and dedicate herself to Christ. Knavishly jealous, the young man had his father threaten Agnes with awful punishments all of which were carried out because she stuck by her guns.   Another sainted woman honored for renouncing the world and embracing purity—back to Maria Goretti.  Funny how Old Testament women like Sara and Elizabeth were sainted because they had babies late in life—and Judith instead of being tortured to death beheaded Holophernes for imposing himself on her!  Seems that those are the women Christ needed to advance his work.  Oddly enough he had them and has them—but His Church has tended to mask their work and lives in favor of these other delicate females—understandable I guess.  What bishop would want to contend with his very own diocesan Judith?

We must have learned about other women who lived their faith fiercely but whose lives were not defined by their sexuality or their renouncing the world or even by Saint Therese’s Little Ways.  But rather by their capacity to intervene on injustice in the world and crack its back in Jesus’ name.  Where are those women saints?? Even the awesome Theresa of Avila was only made a Doctor of the Church in 1970 and by Paul VI who had ignored his largely lay advisory commission and proclaimed Humanae Vitae condemning artificial birth control in 1968.

As I grew into adult years, I remember quietly accepting as I married that there were precious few married women with children who were presented as saints to emulate and fewer still who had tackled the world in expressing their faith—rather than renouncing the world.

Consequently, today, I want to briefly present women in the Church who took the world by storm—some quietly, others more visibly—but they were change agents—as Christ was when he intervened on the stoning of the woman taken in adultery.  Christ taught systemic change—in people’s hearts and in the world’s systems—legal, medical, educational, political.  This is still the work that needs to be done.  Men and women of faith are called whatever their official work is, to keep changing these systems that grind up our less powerful fellow persons and deeply satisfy the more powerful ones who stay IN ABUSIVE POWER BECAUSE NO ONE CAN OR WILL TAKE THEM ON.  Some progress has occurred since Christ walked the earth, but not enough that just such a stoning is not headline news in the New York Times this week.  In other words—there is a lot of work for Christians to do.  Men, and especially WOMEN, need saints to emulate who have tackled systems and changed minds and outcomes as Jesus did.

Who would these women be?  One would be Mother Katharine Drexel.  Born to an extraordinarily wealthy family in Philadelphia in 1858, Katharine’s mother died a month after her birth.  Her father had been a business partner of J.P. Morgan and her uncle Anthony Drexel founded Drexel University in Philadelphia.  After her mother’s death her father remarried another  devout woman who set a strong example of volunteer work for Katharine and her other two daughters by opening a Sunday school for the children of her husbands employees and other neighbors. 

The Drexel family was known for their philanthropy, so much so that her stepmother (Katherine's mother died one month after her birth) was called "Mrs. Generous" in Philadelphia, because of the network of assistance to the poor that she created. Indeed, she supplied medicine, advice and money to help the most marginalized citizens of the city. Her husband covered the expenses and gave free administrative advice to many Catholic charitable institutions.

The girls worked in the school and also spent two additional afternoons a week helping their mother in service to the poor.  Katharine and her sisters became the beneficiaries of their father’s extensive estate income after his death in 1885.  Katharine had met a great missionary to Native Americans, Msgr. Joseph Stephan and from him and from her family’s travels out west and their visits to reservations, she learned firsthand of the terrible living conditions of American Indians.

Katharine’s first courageous commitment to social justice for the poor and discriminated against was during a visit with her father to the Vatican where she asked Pope Leo XIII if  he could recommend a religious order that could staff the institutions she was financing to advance education and quality of life for Native Americans and Blacks whose life she had witnessed personally.  She was told to become that missionary!  That bishop of Rome turned out to be prophetic because she did just that.  Interestingly when she faced certain difficulties having her order approved by the Vatican her adviser was Frances Cabrini who had just succeeded in having her revolutionary order approved.  More on Frances later.
Always a woman of intense prayer, Katharine found in the Eucharist the source of her love for the poor and oppressed and of her concern to reach out to combat the effects of racism.
"The spirit of the Eucharist consists in the donation of one's own being," she wrote. The Eucharist was the source of her love and her commitment to combat the effects of racism. In order to point out the central nucleus of the charisma of the Congregation she founded, she wrote to her Sisters: "get up after receiving Holy Communion and go find him in the people... Everything you do for the people, you do to him."

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.   She refused to take no for an answer—she moved forward with action as well as reflection.  The plantation at that time was an entrenched social institution in which the people of color 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. Restrictions of the law also prevented them in the rural South from obtaining a basic education.

Using her estate funds, she began to build schools on the reservations. She developed housing, funded salaries for teachers and provided food but also convinced priests to serve these sites.  In the course of her work on the reservations she learned about the dismal conditions in which African Americans were living in the South and in the East.  She extended her commitment to changing education and health care for Blacks as well as for American Indians.

By 1889, she decided to become a nun and opted for a cloistered convent.  Her bishop managed to talk her out of that and encouraged her to take another path -- to found an institute to change the conditions in which Native American and Black people were living.  And so she did.  She led this Institute which began with only 13 sisters for 44 years.   What kind of things did this woman without an MBA do?

She purchased an estate in Virginia called Rock Castle and opened a boarding school St. Catherine’s for Black girls near one opened by her sister for Black boys.  She then opened one for Pueblo Indian children in New Mexico.  And then St. Michael’s on the Navaho Indian reservation in 1902.  Subsequently, she opened boarding and day schools all over the East , Midwest and rural and urban areas of the South and Southwest for Native American and Black children. 

In 1917, she worked to establish a teacher preparatory college in New Orleans. In 1915, Louisiana relocated a black college, Southern University, out of New Orleans. Katharine purchased the vacant campus and then reopened the school as Xavier College (now Xavier University). The primary mission of the college was to train lay teachers who would then staff schools for black children in rural Louisiana. Xavier was the first and only Catholic college for African Americans, and a pioneer in co-education.  This college was chartered in Louisiana in 1925 as Xavier University of New Orleans—now one of the nation’s premier historically Black Colleges particularly strong in science prep for its students.  It is also still the only predominantly Black CATHOLIC university in the country.  Mother Katharine personally opened staffed and directly supported some 60 schools and community missions. 

By 1942 she had a system of black Catholic schools in 13 states, 40 mission centers, 23 rural schools, 50 Indian missions, and as noted Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, the first United States university for blacks. Segregationists harassed her work.

She suffered a heart attack in 1935 and retired from active work. At her death in 1955, her still considerable inherited wealth reverted to the charities her father had designated before his death which of course did not include Katharine’s Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament which did not exist at the time of his death.  The order however continues her social justice work today.   In all she gave $20 million which would be well more than $250 million today—saint philanthropist woman wow.

Let me quote from the Institute’s Social Justice Statement, Dr. Patricia Marshall, SJ Director:

We address interracial justice at the systemic level. Though not materially rich, we use what investments we have to meet the challenge of corporate social responsibility by working with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) for justice in and through economic structures, and for stewardship of the earth and its resources. We speak to corporations on many issues. Among them militarism and violence, energy and environment, global finance, and community economic development,  international health, global corporate accountability, and especially equality.
In the Social Justice Office we have served on the boards of HONOR (Honor Our Neighbors' Origins and Rights--American Indian advocacy) and Fund for an OPEN Society (making low-cost mortgages available for interracial neighborhoods). Currently we work with the National Catholic Conference on Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) on their steering committee and serve on several committees at ICCR, including Diversity and Equality.
Taking our cues from Gospel teachings and our foundress, Saint Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament strive "to be a sign of the power of the Eucharistic Christ to effect unity and community among all peoples." We use whatever means we can to further the practice of justice, particularly with Native American Indians, African Americans and Haitians. We work against racism. We work toward self-empowerment. We embrace the Church's option for the poor. Toward these ends we live in inner city neighborhoods, on Indian reservations and in Haiti. And, following again in Saint Katharine's footsteps, we also attempt to educate presidents, editors, legislators and others by writing to them.¹

This is a Catholic woman saint who took on the systems that kept people poor and ignorant.  She took on people who wanted the world to stay that way.  She fought past them and more often than not she won.  She had to deal with construction companies, politicians, lawyers, catholic supporters and members of the KKK who weren’t.  Many probably thought they could dupe her—some probably did but she persevered and endured!  The Little Way?—not at all.  Her own way.
By the way—nothing in any of her histories suggests that virginity or even purity was her main focus—justice was—not that I mean to call her chastity into question (heaven forbid)—it is just that these issues were personal and not definitional of her life’s work.

Katharine’s advisor as we noted was Frances Cabrini, born unlike Katharine on a farm in Italy of poor parents.  Like Katharine she was devoted to her family and worked on the farm with her brothers and sisters until asked by her bishop to teach at a girls’ school, and also at the bishop’s request, she founded a missionary order the missionary sisters of the Sacred Heart to care for poor children in orphanages and hospitals and schools.  In 1889, at the request of the Pope Leo XIII she traveled to the U.S. with six sisters and began to work with Italian immigrants.

Yes, she was devout and a nun and chaste, but we are grateful for her gifted administrative ability, her organizational savvy, her commitment to justice in society.  At the same time that Jane Addams was concerned about the terrible living conditions of immigrants in America’s cities and was founding Hull House and its analogs all over the country, Frances Cabrini, applied her talents to very similar work. She was re-structuring the systems like housing, health care and education that kept the poor, well, poor and sick, uneducated and less employable.

Much to their dismay, upon their arrival to the U.S. on March 21, 1889, they were met after waiting many hours for the Scalabrinian Fathers. The Sisters, tired and weary, were feeling a reaction to change. Therefore, they asked politely if they might go to the house that was prepared. The Sisters were taken to a place in the slums of New York so filthy that they couldn't sleep in the infested beds of the apartment. Sensing the real and many difficulties facing them, prayer was there to comfort them. The next morning, the Sisters went to pay their respects to Archbishop Corrigan. He felt the only solution to the problem was for Cabrini and her sisters to return to Italy.

Cabrini -- with calmness and the courage which God empowered within her -- said, "No, your Grace, that is impossible. I have come here with the permission of Holy See, and here I will remain."

New York was just the beginning. She followed in the steps of Italian immigrants, hoping to ease their suffering and educated them for work in America -- in Chicago, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Denver, Newark, Philadelphia, Scranton, Seattle and Los Angeles. Beyond America, Mother Cabrini managed to make most of the civilized world her own particular missionary field. As she sailed the seas and crossed continents, she left in her wake institutions of service -- and always the beautiful memory of her kind words and cheerful smile.

No mountain was too high to climb. Traveling to Buenos Aires, she crossed the Andes riding high atop a mule. It was during her second voyage that she began the custom of writing letters to her sisters in the form of a travel diary. These letters provide valuable biographical documentation and vivid descriptions of the places where she established missions across the United States, Spain, France, England, as well as Nicaragua, Brazil and Argentina.

Missionary Entrepreneurism

As one of her sisters wrote: The foundations of Mother Cabrini bear no comparison whatsoever with the foundations of the world, because she had no other ambition but to do what God asked her. The final results usually exceeded any means or any plan. Quiet and humble by nature, she pushed ahead with fierce determination. In the service of God she was indomitable. As a financier, she gathered and managed large sums of money for the colossal undertakings of her institutions. The details of her life also include some incredible details of her business transactions: negotiating loans in Seattle, closing a real estate deal in Los Angeles, haggling with merchants for lower prices, beseeching a bishop or benefactor to back a new project, discussing some favors with politicians, discovering a cheating contractor while building a hospital in Chicago and taking over the job herself... She seemed quite at home as a business executive and administrator, which she attributed solely to her trust in God's direction of all of her actions.

From the time Mother Cabrini was welcomed on her first missionary journey only by the outstretched arms of the Statue of Liberty in 1889, until her death in 1917, her energies, organizing skills, optimism, insistence, steadfast faith and cajoling, won the hearts of the world. With little or no material resources, she was able to found some 67 institutions, one for each year of her life: schools, hospitals, orphanages with programs serving the poor, the tired, the displaced immigrants. She was inspired by the love of God and the words of St. Paul that challenges us all to adopt her motto: "I can do all things in God who strengthens me."

If St. Frances Xavier Cabrini were alive today the passion and zeal of her missionary spirit would find a world very much in need of her witness, courage and absolute trust in God. She would discover women still faced with abuse and inequity, children still hungry for nurturing and attention, immigrants still struggling against prejudice, injustice and intolerance. She would:
...walk the streets, read the newspapers, surf the net and use whatever means possible to listen to the stories of the world's needy...
... reach out to all, in solidarity and hospitality...
... enter their reality, fan into flame their smoldering dreams, remind them of their faith...
... pray to understand what God desires -- then go out and "just do it!"
... identify and make her needs known in order to find collaborators and benefactors willing to help her in seeing to it that God's work was being done...
... encourage their confidence and inspire them to turn to God, believing St. Paul 's words: "I can do all things..."

"I found myself with Mother [Cabrini] in moments of great difficulty and I always noticed two things: to know that she was suffering you really had to know her because outwardly she remained calm and serene, but she felt misunderstandings very keenly to the depths of her soul; secondly, she had indescribable courage and energy. One could clearly perceive that Mother saw her road pointed out by God's will."

"How marvelous to witness Mother transact business of the Institute! In struggles she remained tranquil and steady in her confidence of God. She would say: We are obliged to do everything possible to defend our cause, which is the Lord's. In the end He will arrange things as He considers best.' But she didn't stand idle. On the contrary, in difficult situations her strength of soul and courage would grow in proportion to the difficulty." 
 
Of course Drexel and Cabrini are only two great women transformers.  Angela Merici,  Dorothy Day,  Mother Theresa and others merit our attention.  I am glad I knew them from my own searches for women saints to guide me as I embarked a few years ago on an ambitious project to try to build the economy in New London, Connecticut.  I am grateful for the example these saints set as women who made the systems accommodate the needy…just as Christ advised we try to do.  As I recall Sacred Scripture, Christ was actually less vocal about purity (pace, Maria Goretti) than He was about standing with the disadvantaged as Drexel and Cabrini did.  Why don’t we let girls hear stories of these women more prominently?