Today, March 3rd, as our Church celebrates the optional Memorial of Saint Katharine Drexel, Virgin, we are first invited to reflect on a passage from the letter of the apostle Paul to the Corinthians (4: 1-24), entitled "Christian Chastity". Our treasure, which follows, is from a homily on the Gospels by Saint Gregory the Great, pope.
| Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 26, 1858, Saint Katharine Drexel was the second daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth. Her father was a well-known banker and philanthropist. Both parents instilled in their daughters the idea that their wealth was simply loaned to them and was to be shared with others. When the family took a trip to the Western part of the United States, Katharine, as a young woman, saw the plight and destitution of the native Indian Americans. This experience aroused her desire to do something specific to help alleviate their condition. This was the beginning of her lifelong personal and financial support of numerous missions and missionaries in the United States. The first school she established was St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1887). Later, when visiting Pope Leo XIII in Rome, and asking him for missionaries to staff some of the Indian missions that she as a lay person was financing, she was surprised to hear the Pope suggest that she become a missionary herself. After consultation with her spiritual director, Bishop James O'Connor, she made the decision to give herself totally to God, along with her inheritance, through service to American Indians and Afro-Americans. Her wealth was now transformed into a poverty of spirit that became a daily constant in a life supported only by the bare necessities. On February 12, 1891, she professed her first vows as a religious, founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament whose dedication would be to share the message of the Gospel and the life of the Eucharist among American Indians and Afro-Americans. Founding and staffing schools for both Native Americans and Afro-Americans throughout the country became a priority for Katharine and her congregation. During her lifetime, she opened, staffed and directly supported nearly 60 schools and missions, especially in the West and Southwest United States. Her crowning educational focus was the establishment in 1925 of Xavier University of Louisiana, the only predominantly Afro-American Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States. Religious education, social service, visiting homes, in hospitals and in prisons were also included in the ministries of Katharine and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. In her quiet way, Katharine combined prayerful and total dependence on Divine Providence with determined activism. Her joyous incisiveness, attuned to the Holy Spirit, penetrated obstacles and facilitated her advances for social justice. Through the prophetic witness of Katharine Drexel's initiative, the Church in the United States was enabled to become aware of the grave domestic need for an apostolate among Native Americans and Afro-Americans. She did not hesitate to speak out against injustice, taking a public stance when racial discrimination was in evidence. |
Doctor of the Church; born at Rome about 540; died 12 March 604. Saint Gregory is certainly one of the most notable figures in Ecclesiastical History. He has exercised in many respects a momentous influence on the doctrine, the organization, and the discipline of the Catholic Church. To him we must look for an explanation of the religious situation of the Middle Ages; indeed, if no account were taken of his work, the evolution of the form of medieval Christianity would be almost inexplicable. And further, in so far as the modern Catholic system is a legitimate development of medieval Catholicism, of this too Gregory may not unreasonably be termed the Father. Almost all the leading principles of the later Catholicism are found at any rate in germ, in Gregory the Great.
Pope Gregory was a prolific writer whose works were influential in the medieval period. During his lifetime, he penned over 800 letters and authored accounts of the lives of the saints and other religious works. Using simple words to preach to the nobles and common people of Rome, Gregory employed metaphors, analogies, stories, and images to answer basic questions of faith and morals. He is known for instituting the first recorded large-scale mission of Rome, the Gregorian mission, to convert the then largely pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity,
In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul warns against divisions within the Church and emphasizes the importance of unity among Church members. He warns members against sexual immorality, teaches that the body is a temple for the Holy Spirit, and encourages self-discipline.
