Women in USA Church

Women in the church are being celebrated twice in as many weeks in the USA.

In February the dignity and vocation of women came under the spotlight at the annual Edith Stein Project conference at University of Notre Dame.  Then today (March 3) comes the feast of St. Katharine Drexel, a Philadelphia heiress who abandoned her family fortune to serve poor African American and American Indian communities.

Organisers of the Edith Stein Project chose her as their patron saint as a woman who worked to live out her vocation through the genuine feminine spirit of self-gift.  Lisa Everett, Office of Family Life, spoke on married motherhood and how culture needs to reflect again how a mother cannot be replaced with just any caregiver.  She said that the Mother of Jesus is a model of motherhood having a heart large enough to contain the entire human race. 

Edith Stein (pictured), canonised in 1998 and known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, converted to Catholicism and entered the Carmelite order, but was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942 because of her Jewish heritage.  Sister Benedicta, said that although nuns give up having their own children they have God's family, and they can mother people spiritually.

The second women’s celebration this week is that of Katharine Drexel, born in 1858, in Philadelphia.  Despite her family’s money she learned about charity as a youngster as her mother fed the poor in the family home, and her father was devout.

The young heiress, who was considering a vocation to the contemplative life, was asked by Pope Leo XIII to found an order in America.  Her work with African Americans and Native Americans led her to found the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.

During her lifetime, she saw the opening of nearly 60 schools and missions, and Xavier University, in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1925.  Due to illness she did not work for the last 20 years of her life but passed her charism of love and concern for the missions to the sisters around her.  She died on March 3, 1955 and was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 2000.

by Ann Marie Foley