c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Katharine Drexel, a millionaire heiress who renounced Philadelphia society to become a Catholic nun working among impoverished blacks and Indians, and who later used her fortune to found the only black Catholic college in the country, has cleared the last major hurdle in the process the Catholic Church employs to identify saints, her religious order announced Thursday (Oct. 7).

The Vatican informed Drexel’s Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament that a team of medical examiners in Rome could find no natural explanation for the restoration of hearing in an unidentified 6- or 7-year-old Pennsylvania child earlier found to be completely deaf, and whose family said they prayed to Drexel to intercede with God on their child’s behalf.

If formally accepted in a later process, the healing would constitute the required second miracle the church regards as divine confirmation that a candidate is worthy of worldwide emulation.

Members of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the religious order Drexel founded in 1891, quickly posted news of the decision on their Web site (http://www.katharinedrexel.org), then began telephoning members of their order in 11 states, including the convent attached to Xavier University, which Drexel founded in 1925.

The news has brought special attention to a few of them, such as Sister Mary Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, who for two years as a novice in the early 1940s took two meals a day to the elderly Drexel at the order’s mother house outside Philadelphia.”I was in my early 20s and too young to know much. In the community, she was this figure of awe and reverence, but I was too young to be impressed,”said Fitzpatrick, who became a high school teacher and later led Drexel’s order in the 1970s.”She was very open with me. She’d ask how my day went; we’d talk,”she said.

In the 1940s, Drexel was well past the age when she traveled the country to visit her order’s works, taking along a bag lunch she had packed herself, said Sister Elizabeth Collins, another member of the Xavier community.”She was like everybody else,”Fitzpatrick said.”She lived in a plain old room, patched her own clothes, didn’t have any more than anyone else did.” But, in fact, she did.

Born in 1858, Drexel was one of three daughters of Francis A. Drexel, a wealthy international banker who guaranteed his daughters a lifetime income generated by a $14 million trust.

But not long after making her debut into Philadelphia society,”Katie”Drexel entered a convent and assumed the disciplines of religious life. She founded her community of nuns in 1891.

Having taken a vow of poverty, Drexel gave all her income away, much of it to aid disadvantaged American Indians and African-Americans, two groups to whom she devoted her career and dedicated her order of nuns.

At her death in 1955, her donations had amounted to about $20 million, according to her order.

In 1915, after a neighborhood uproar drove Southern University from its predominantly white neighborhood on Magazine Street in New Orleans, Drexel quietly purchased the property through intermediaries and opened a high school for black children.

The high school later became a teacher training institution and, in 1925, evolved into Xavier University.”In our community, we consider Xavier the jewel of Mother Katharine’s life,”said Sister Faith Okerson, a spokeswoman for Drexel’s order, based in Bensalem, Pa., near Philadelphia.

Born in the decade before the Civil War, Drexel died at the threshold of the civil rights movement, at the age of 96.

Her career was focused on establishing schools, missions and other services for American Indians in the West and Southwest, and for African-Americans in the South.

Unlike Martin Luther King Jr., who used the gospel to guide his campaign to improve the lives of African-Americans, Drexel did not challenge the social and legal context in which she worked.”The King model would not have worked in 1891,”said Sister Grace Mary Flickinger, the head of Drexel’s community in New Orleans.”It was simply too early.” Drexel’s case is moving relatively quickly by church standards, where a century or more is frequently the norm for declaring a person a saint.

There is no timetable for the process, and no one knows whether Drexel’s case will be hurried to completion, perhaps as early as next year. In Catholic belief, the declaration of sainthood means the person is definitively in heaven, having died a martyr for the faith or lived a life of heroic virtue worthy of emulation.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

Drexel’s case cleared an earlier stage of the process in 1988, when the church beatified her, or declared her”Blessed.” That declaration was the product of years of research into her life, the testimony of colleagues, and the examination of Drexel’s journals and more than 3,000 personal letters for evidence she always adhered to church teaching.

That stage, too, required a miracle _ coincidentally, an earlier restoration of hearing in a Philadelphia-area deaf child.”I think that is God’s way of telling us we have to hear Mother Katharine’s message of social justice, that we’re all children of the same God,”Flickinger said.

Although acceptance of the second healing is considered the most important milestone, three more steps remain to be completed before a declaration of sainthood is made.

With the medical evidence in hand, a team of Vatican theologians must affirm the healing was due solely to prayers to Drexel to intercede with God, a necessary step before the healing can be regarded as a miracle, Okerson said.

If the medical case passes theological muster, a team of cardinals and bishops will make a recommendation to Pope John Paul II, who will make the final decision.

If canonized, she would become the fourth American saint, joining Mother Elizabeth Seton, an educator; Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, an educator and social worker; and St. John Neumann, a 19th century bishop of Philadelphia.

DEA END NOLAN