Katharine Drexel: Wrestling with the Call

Saint for Saturday, September 19, 2026
Katharine Drexel, Roman Catholic, 1858–1955

Source: A Year with American Saints, G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber, Church Publishing, 2006.

There is something about Katharine Drexel’s story that caught my attention: she wrestled with her call.

That word wrestled takes me immediately to Jacob.

Jacob was hardly the obvious candidate for God’s purposes. He had deceived his brother Esau and his father Isaac. Eventually, as he prepared to face Esau again, Jacob spent a night wrestling with a mysterious stranger. Jacob understood the encounter as somehow wrestling with God.

When morning came, Jacob had a new name, a blessing, and a limp.

He had been changed by the wrestling.

Katharine Drexel’s wrestling was different, but I see something of Jacob in her discernment.

She was born into one of America’s wealthiest families. Yet wealth did not protect her from sorrow. Her mother died only weeks after Katharine’s birth. Years later, Katharine spent several years helping care for her stepmother, Emma, as she suffered from cancer.

Her father and stepmother were devout Roman Catholics who taught their children that faith included caring for people in need. As a young girl, Katharine helped Emma distribute food and clothing to poor people who came to their home.

The ground was already being prepared.

Then Katharine went and saw.

During visits to Bishop James O’Connor in the West, she traveled to Native American reservations and witnessed poverty and lack of educational opportunity firsthand. Something changed. The suffering of other people was no longer merely something she had heard about. She had encountered it.

She knew she could use her considerable inheritance to help.

But another question was developing.

Was God asking for her money—or was God asking for her?

That question led to wrestling.

Katharine considered religious life, but she could think of plenty of reasons against it. She loved her family and dreaded leaving them. She disliked the thought of community life. She valued being alone. She felt drawn toward contemplation.

So she sought counsel. She prayed. She questioned. She corresponded with a trusted spiritual adviser for two years.

Interestingly, her adviser initially believed she could serve the Church better while remaining in secular life. Eventually Katharine became convinced that she truly had a religious vocation.

Then came another surprise.

Her adviser changed course and encouraged her not simply to enter an existing community but to establish one devoted to ministry among Native Americans and African Americans.

Katharine wondered why an existing religious order could not do that work.

More wrestling.

Eventually she answered the call.

In 1891 she founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a religious community devoted particularly to education and ministry among Native American and African American communities. By the time of her death in 1955, the community had grown to hundreds of sisters serving through dozens of convents and schools, as well as Xavier University of Louisiana.

But I keep coming back to the wrestling.

We sometimes imagine God’s call as something perfectly clear: God speaks, we understand, and we immediately say yes.

Scripture gives us a more complicated picture.

Moses objected.

Jeremiah protested.

Gideon questioned.

Jonah ran.

Mary asked, “How can this be?”

And Jacob wrestled through the night.

Perhaps wrestling does not mean that faith is absent.

Perhaps sometimes wrestling is part of faith.

We do not come to discernment empty-handed. We bring our whole story with us—our upbringing, relationships, losses, opportunities, fears, abilities, experiences, questions, and even the things we would rather not surrender.

Katharine Drexel brought all of that into her discernment.

Her parents had taught her compassion.

Loss had taught her that wealth could not protect us from every sorrow.

Her travels allowed her to see suffering for herself.

Her inheritance gave her resources with which she could respond.

Her faith asked what she would do about what she had seen.

And somewhere in all of that, the question became larger than what she would do with her money.

It became what she would do with her life.

That is where I find mysterious grace in Katharine Drexel’s story.

Grace had been working before she understood where any of it was leading.

And perhaps that is true for us as well.

Sometimes God’s call does not come as a voice that immediately settles every question.

Sometimes we discover the call while wrestling.

We pray.

We question.

We seek counsel.

We go and see.

We listen.

We struggle.

And somewhere in the wrestling, we begin to discover not only what God may be asking us to do, but who we are becoming.

Jacob walked away from his wrestling with a new name, a blessing, and a limp.

Katharine Drexel walked away from hers with a vocation.

Mysterious grace had been there all along.

— The Curious Pilgrim