Western North Carolina may have been mission territory for much of its history, yet that missionary spirit attracted two women here who are now saints: St. Katharine Drexel and St. Teresa of Calcutta. Not only did they visit, they made a permanent impact on the local Church that we remain blessed with today.
St. Katharine Drexel
Katharine Drexel was a Philadelphia heiress who shocked high society by becoming a nun and spending her family’s fortune on serving the nation’s impoverished
African American and Native American populations. She gave away the bulk of her inherited millions to build churches, found missions, and establish and operate schools throughout the South and West. The religious order she founded – the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament – provided education to people of all races and creeds, insisting on equality and racial justice but renouncing assimilation. The first saint born a U.S. citizen, her feast day is March 3.
The extraordinary philanthropist and advocate for the poor generously contributed funds to help build four churches in western North Carolina – all with the stipulation that black and white Catholics should be able to worship together.
When the Benedictines were building the second St. Peter Church in Charlotte in 1892 (after the first one was demolished), Drexel gave them money to buy the pews that parishioners of all backgrounds, races and ethnicities continue to use today. Her image is memorialized in the sanctuary.
“St. Katharine had the obedience and the courage to see that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven,” notes Jesuit Father John Michalowski, parochial vicar of St. Peter Church.
“Today her example and gift are honored at St. Peter’s in a bas-relief to the left of the altar. There St. Katharine is caught up in prayer and ecstasy as she contemplates a Jesus and Mary with African-American features. She knew that God’s will is to reconcile all peoples into the one Body of Christ, and she acted to carry out His will.”
In 1892, Abbot Leo Haid, the first abbot of Belmont Abbey, set out to build a cathedral. Within months, however, he ran out of money. He reached out for help from Benedictine Father Francis Meyer, then pastor of St. Peter’s in Charlotte. The priest helped the abbot write a letter to the same benefactor who had bought pews for his new church.
Drexel generously replied, sending him $4,000 in 1893 to help fund the construction of Church of Maryhelp (today called Mary, Help of Christians Basilica), with the requirement that an appropriate number of pews be reserved for the use of Black Catholics.
A few years later, she also sent $1,500 to St. Benedict Parish in Greensboro to help build a church for its growing congregation, which had sorely outgrown a church built two decades earlier. Again, she mandated that a number of pews be designated for Black Catholics.
With this declaration – more than 60 years before the famous sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter just down the road – a glimmer of an integrated Greensboro in a then-segregated South could be found at the city’s first Catholic parish. A few of those original pews remain in place today, lining the back of the church near the Pièta statue.
And in 1900, Drexel sent another $1,500 to the Benedictine monks at Belmont Abbey so they could build a church in nearby Gastonia. They named it St. Michael Church.
Drexel traveled to the state in March 1904 to inspect the results of her largesse. While she was unable to visit all the churches she had financially supported, she paid a visit to Abbot Haid and the monks at Belmont Abbey. There she was pleased to see an entire row of pews running the length of the abbey church for Black Catholics’ use.
St. Teresa of Calcutta
Mother Teresa’s visit to the Charlotte Coliseum on June 13, 1995, drew a lot of fanfare and publicity, but there was also a quieter moment during her visit: on the east side of the city, where she officially established a convent for four of her sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, with her longtime friend and confessor, Bishop William Curlin. It was the first convent in North Carolina for the Missionaries of Charity, who serve in more than 100 countries around the world.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner and famous nun was frail – just two years later she would die at the age of 87 – but she retained her characteristic smile, earnestness of spirit, and hands ever-clasped in prayer.
The private dedication of the convent was held after she had finished speaking to a crowd of thousands at an ecumenical service where TV cameras and reporters captured her every move. She accompanied Bishop Curlin and her sisters to South Torrence Street, where Bishop Curlin celebrated the first Mass, enthroned the Blessed Sacrament and blessed the convent.
The Missionaries of Charity now live in a different location, yet 25 years later, members of her order still care for the poorest and most vulnerable in Charlotte.
“She saw with an inner vision,” said Bishop Curlin during a memorial Mass at St. Patrick Cathedral two years after the saint’s death. “She saw with her heart. It was her belief that if you want to touch God, you reach down and touch a crying child, a dying person, you feed the homeless or just reach out to the broken-hearted.”
That, he recalled, is where Mother Teresa said you would find Jesus, in the least among us.
“Mother believed that Christians should be possessed by Jesus alone, and that love drives them out to the streets to serve the most needy,” he said. “She said the greatest hunger is not physical hunger; it is the emptiness of God in us crying out for the fullness of God. The greatest hunger is for God, even if we don’t know Him.”
She was canonized in 2016, and her connection to Charlotte didn’t end with Bishop Curlin. St. Peter’s parishioner and renowned American artist Chas Fagan was commissioned to create the official portrait for her canonization Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica.
During a Mass that week in Charlotte offered in thanksgiving for her canonization, Sister M. Shilanand, M.C., told the Catholic News Herald that Mother Teresa was specific about how she would help others if she were to become a saint.
“I remember what she said: ‘If I will be a saint, I will be one of darkness. I will be continually absent from heaven because I want to help. I want to come back to light the light of those who live in darkness.’
“My message to all of us is that we ask for her intercession. She has promised she will come to help us.”
— SueAnn Howell, Senior reporter. Catholic News Agency, www.Catholic.org, www.KatharineDrexel.org, Jesuit Father John Michalowski and Shawn Flynn contributed.