Katharine Drexel: Heiress to a Mission

Katharine Drexel was born in eighteen fifty-eight into one of Philadelphia's wealthiest banking families, and she gave it all away. After her parents died she used her vast inheritance to fund mission schools and churches for Native American and African American communities across the United States. In eighteen ninety-one she professed her religious vows and founded her own religious order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, leading it for more than forty years.

Her ministries were built on the conviction that quality education was the most powerful tool against racial inequality. Holy Providence School near this marker was one of many institutions she supported. By the time of her death she had directed tens of millions of dollars, in the money of her day, toward communities that had been systematically excluded from public resources.

Pope John Paul the Second canonized her in the year two thousand, making her only the second American-born saint in the Catholic Church.