Honoring Saint Katharine Drexel today on her feast day. After three and a half years of training, she and her first band of nuns opened a boarding school, St. Catherines Indian School, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1897, Mother Drexel asked the friars of St. John the Baptist Province in Cincinnati, Ohio, to staff a mission among the Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico on a 160-acre tract of land she had purchased two years earlier. Mother Katharine Drexel stretched the Cincinnati friars apostolically since most of them previously had worked in predominantly German-American parishes. A few years later, she also helped finance the work of the friars among the Pueblo Native Americans in New Mexico. In 1910, Drexel financed the printing of 500 copies of A Navaho-English Catechism of Christian Doctrine for the Use of Navaho Children, written by Fathers Anselm, Juvenal, Berard and Leopold Osterman. About a hundred friars from St. John the Baptist Province started Our Lady of Guadalupe Province in 1985. Headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they continue to work on the Navajo reservation with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. In all, Drexel established 50 missions for Native Americans in 16 states. I feel so honored that I actually got to teach at St. Catherines Indian School campus for two years at which time I had the honor of walking the halls and grounds that St. Katharine once roamed. St. Catharine Drexel pray for us that we may follow that path which Our Creator want us to.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 18:10:16 +0000
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