Catherine Mary Drexel was born to one of the wealthiest families in nineteenth-century America. Her father Francis Anthony Drexel was a Philadelphia banker (partner of J.P. Morgan); her uncle Anthony was the founder of Drexel University. Her mother died of cancer five weeks after Katharine's birth; her stepmother Emma raised the three Drexel daughters with a Catholic discipline that included opening their home three days a week to the Philadelphia poor.
Her father died in 1885 leaving the three sisters a fortune of fifteen million dollars (more than 450 million in 2025 terms), the income of which would support them for life. In 1887, on an audience with Leo XIII, Katharine asked the pope to send missionaries to the Indigenous peoples of the American West. The pope replied: 'Why don't you become a missionary yourself?' She did. In 1891 she founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People at her own expense.
Over the next sixty-three years she funded, founded, or staffed almost every Catholic school for Black and Native American children in the United States: more than fifty schools on Native reservations from Arizona to Wyoming, sixty-two schools for Black children in the South, and one university — Xavier University of New Orleans, the only historically Black Catholic university in the United States, founded by her in 1925 and still operating.
She suffered a heart attack at seventy-seven and spent her last twenty years in a wheelchair, dedicated to contemplative prayer in the chapel of the motherhouse at Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania. She died there at ninety-six. By the terms of her father's will, the trust fund — which she had used to support her schools but never to enrich her congregation — passed at her death to the Catholic Church. Her schools and Xavier University continued without her wealth.