School builder and founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People
When she asked Pope Leo XIII to send more missionaries to Wyoming, he asked her, "Why don't you become a missionary?" As a young, wealthy, educated girl from Philadelphia, this was hardly the expected lifestyle for young Katharine Drexel. But raised in a devout family with a deep sympathy for the poor, Katharine gave up everything to become a missionary to the Indians and African Americans. She founded schools in thirteen states for African Americans, forty mission centers and twenty-three rural schools. She also established fifty missions for Indians in sixteen different states. She died at the age of ninety-six and was canonized in the year 2000.
Source: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, usccb.org