Making Saints by Kenneth L. Woodward

Author:Kenneth L. Woodward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

The first witness, retired Bishop Joseph McShea of Allentown, Pennsylvania, thought her canonization “would be a great stimulus to further missionary work among the Blacks.” It would also, he said, “bring out not only the successes but the failures and the difficulties and it would show how this heroic woman was able to muster a force of other women, dedicated women, and cope with the problems and do so very, very much.” But he also worried that the canonization might fuel complaints from blacks that during her long years as mother superior she “didn’t accept Black candidates” as members of her religious congregation. On the other hand, he did not expect any such “protests” from Native Americans.

The second witness, Bishop Connare, was of the opinion that Mother Drexel would serve “as a great example of racial justice.” In response to another question, the bishop adds: “It would be a recognition of the sincere interest that the church has had in these minorities. We are often criticized about what we have not done with the Blacks and native Americans. Here we have an example of somebody who did something positively. Out of her schools we have evidence of a lot of fine Christian families who have come from those schools. There are a lot of people like that and a good number of vocations to the religious life and the priesthood.”

The testimony of a third bishop, Warren Boudreaux of Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana, is of particular interest. Boudreaux had no personal contact with Mother Drexel, but as a priest he had served as secretary to Bishop Jules Jeanmard of Lafayette, Louisiana, which, at that time, had two-thirds of all the black Catholics in the United States within its ecclesiastical boundaries. From the questions put to Boudreaux, it is obvious that the tribunal was trying to establish the unique importance of Mother Katharine’s work in providing education for blacks in that heavily Catholic area. When asked what “the church was doing for them [blacks] prior to Mother Katharine Drexel,” Boudreaux responded in three ways. First he defended Bishop Jeanmard, especially his efforts in bringing black priests into his diocese. He then noted how difficult it was in the twenties and thirties to do much more than this for blacks. Racial integration of schools, he observed, was forbidden by civil law. “So I must say honestly,” he testified, “that Mother Drexel did very little in the field of integration, but I think it is because of the fact that in a sense she could have suffered greatly from the law.” The bishop later went on to explain why he thought Mother Drexel should be canonized:

I think this is true, that the Church needs a witness for history’s sake. The Protestants had their Martin Luther King [Jr.], but here is a Catholic woman who, at a time when it was not popular, and at a time when in general Blacks were looked down upon, truly had great success to bear witness to the love of Christ

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.