Mar 03rd - Katharine Drexel

Seeing others is sometimes a difficult task and we have to be taken out of our everyday lives to see them. As Mark Twain put it, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Growing up in a privileged but Faith-filled family, it was not until she traveled out to the American West that she saw the plight of Native and Black Americans. Moved with pity, she began by collecting monies to aid them. In an audience with Pope Leo XIII, Katharine asked him to send missionary priests to the United States to minister to Native Americans. The pope turned it back on her and asked why she did not become a missionary herself.
And so she did, founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament who work to improve the lives of those they served.
So, she asks us, "what are you doing?"

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And here is the passive way – to be filled unto the fullness of God. The passive way – I abandon myself to it, not in a multiplicity of trials, extraordinary penances accomplished, practices of great works – but in peaceful abandonment to the tenderness of Jesus, which I must try to imitate, and by being in constant union with his meek and humble heart.

-- unconfirmed citation