[On July 7, 1946, Frances Xavier “Mother” Cabrini became (posthumously) the first American to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. So this week for the 80th anniversary of that occasion I’ll AmericanStudy Cabrini and four other American saints, leading up to a weekend post on Catholics in 2026 America!]
On a fortuitous encounter between two saints, and the global and American contexts behind it.
As traced at length by the minister and historian Gus Puleo in this 2018 article for American Catholic Studies, in May 1907 the woman who inspired my weeklong series (Mother Cabrini) paid an unexpected and productive visit to Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), the woman who would become the first saint to be born in the United States (Monday’s subject Elizabeth Ann Seton and Wednesday’s Kateri Tekakwitha were both born long before the Revolution). Cabrini was passing through Philadelphia on one of her many mission trips up and down the East Coast, and wanted to thank Drexel for the kindnesses she had shown Cabrini’s MSC sisters in the city. And Cabrini expressed her gratitude in a very tangible way, as Drexel had been dealing with challenges from the Vatican bureaucracy, and Cabrini apparently convinced Drexel to travel to Rome and advocate for herself and her charitable missions (on which more below) directly, which Drexel subsequently did successfully.
I haven’t written much in this week’s series about the relationships between these American figures and future saints and the Vatican, and for a specific reason: for at minimum a couple centuries, certainly at least up through the 1960 presidential election, anti-Catholic narratives in the U.S. made much of the idea that American Catholics owed their allegiance not to this nation but to the distant power of the Vatican, the Pope, etc. I don’t believe there’s any truth to that, no more than our contemporary xenophobic narratives of Muslim Americans seeking to instill “sharia law” or the like. But one complex and fascinating aspect of the stories of all the future saints I’ve traced in this series is that they did have to maintain connections to Catholic hierarchies, both in the United States and around the world, while also navigating the kinds of specifically American contexts and challenges I’ve highlighted for which (and on which more in a moment for Drexel). It’s really interesting to imagine Cabrini and Drexel talking about precisely such questions in their 1907 meeting.
That was even more certainly the case because Drexel was attempting to gain Vatican support for her lifelong mission: serving minority communities in the United States through Catholic churches, charities, missions, and more. She did so most consistently for the two communities highlighted in the name of the organization she founded in 1891 and for which she served as Superior General until 1937: the Congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. But she likewise extended those efforts to other disadvantaged American communities, as illustrated by her work in early 20th century New Orleans, where she not only founded Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically Black Catholic university in the U.S., but also partnered with Isabelle Smith, also known as Mother Loyola of the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine de’ Ricci, to offer resources and support for Afro-Cuban children who had been orphaned by the events of the Spanish American War. Those deeply American challenges and efforts, undertaken by a future Catholic saint with the begrudging but necessary support of a European institution, embody the complex and inspiring spirit of every individual I’ve highlighted this week.
Current events post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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