Saint of the Day, March 3

Saint Katharine Drexel (1858–1955), heiress of a Philadelphia banking fortune, used her entire inheritance — some twenty million nineteenth-century dollars — to evangelize and educate Black and Native Americans at a time when both communities were systematically excluded from Catholic life. She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People in 1891 and over six decades opened almost sixty missions and schools, culminating in Xavier University of Louisiana in 1925, still the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States. She is the second American-born saint and a pioneer for racial justice in the American Church.