Katharine Drexel

Saint Katharine Drexel is the patroness of racial justice and of philanthropists because of the singular shape of her life: heiress to one of the great American fortunes, she gave it all away — some twenty million dollars over her lifetime — to found the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and pour her wealth into schools and missions for African Americans and Native Americans, peoples then despised and neglected. She built over sixty missions and schools, and established Xavier University in New Orleans, still the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States. Educators and philanthropists claim her for the same reason: she made the giving away of riches, and the lifting up of the oppressed through learning, the whole work of her days.