When St. Katharine Drexel Defeated the KKK

St. Katharine Drexel was the first person born a U.S. citizen to become a saint. And what a saint she was!

Born into a wealthy family in 1858, when St. Katharine got older, she took a vow of poverty, founded a new order of religious sisters, and devoted her great wealth to serving those discriminated against in the U.S., namely Native Americans and African-Americans.

In the early 20th century, this got her into a lot of trouble, especially with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The KKK was not only notoriously anti-black, but also anti-Catholic. So you can imagine how they felt about Catholic sisters helping blacks!

One thing that St. Katharine’s order did was open up schools for Native American and African-American children.

In 1922, a local KKK group turned against one of their schools in Beaumont, Texas and “threatened to tar and feather the white past[or] at one of Drexel’s schools and bomb his church.”

So what did the sisters do? They prayed, of course!

And here’s what happened, according to one account: “The nuns prayed, and days later, a tornado came and destroyed the headquarters of the KKK, killing two of their members.”

The result? “The Sisters were never threatened again.”

Don’t mess with God’s saints!

“Christ wishes the Christian Community to be a body that is perfect because we work together towards a single end, and the higher the motive which actuates this collaboration the higher, no doubt, will be the union. Now the end in question is supremely exalted: the continuous sanctification of the Body for the glory of God and the Lamb that was slain [Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament].” – St. Katharine Drexel