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Women Saints the Church Needs to Guide Those Who Want to Repair the World

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.