Veiled Leadership: Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Race Relations

On the rainy morning of October 1, 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized Mother Katharine Drexel. Born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, Drexel bucked society and formed the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. Her compelling personal story has excited many biographers who have highlighted her holiness and catalogued her good deeds. During her life, newspapers called her the "Millionaire Nun," and much of the literature on Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament exalts Katharine Drexel's disbursement of her vast fortune to benefit Black and Indigenous people. The often repeated stories of a riches to rags holy woman miss the true significance of what Mother Katharine and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament attempted. Drexel was not merely the ATM of Catholic Home Missions; rather, she challenged the hierarchy to reimagine its mission in the United States. In an era when the Church controlled the actions and censored the opinions of women religious, they had to listen to Mother Katharine. Most writing on Drexel and the SBS focus on Drexel's spiritual journey, but Veiled Leadership traces the daily operations of her charitable empire and looks at how the Sisters implemented Drexel's vision in the field. The SBS were not always welcomed in the communities they served, and they experienced conflict from both white supremacists and the people they wanted to aid. Veiled Leadership examines the lives of Mother Katharine and her congregation within the context of larger constructs of gender, race, religion, reform, and national identity. It explores what happens when a non-dominant culture tries to impose its views and morals on other non-dominant cultures. In other words, as outliers themselves―they were semi-cloistered Catholic women from primarily immigrant backgrounds in a culture that regarded their lifestyles as alien and unnatural―their attempts to Americanize and assimilate Black and Indigenous people, whose families had been in the country for generations longer than the nuns' own, adds complexity to our understanding of cultural hegemony. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. “A New Virility”: The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and a New Catholic Mission 1. “Go Ye Forth and Teach All Nations”: Mother Katharine Drexel’s Challenge to the Catholic Church 2. “Received from Other Sources”: Mother Katharine Drexel and the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions 3. “Souls! Souls! Should Be Our Cry, Our Ambition, Our Only Aim”: SBS Administration of Indigenous Schools 4. Intent and Impact: Assessing SBS Indigenous Missions 5. Human Rights and Sacramental Rites: SBS Missions in Black Communities 6. Navigating Race and Religion in Jim Crow Louisiana 7. The Catholic Rosenwald: Mother Katharine Schools in Rural Louisiana 8. From Spiritual to Temporal Needs: The Evolution of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and Catholic Social Justice 9. “These Kluxes Are All Wrought Up”: Battling the “Catholic Problem” and Conflicting Visions of America Conclusion Bibliography