26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The gospel passage for this Sunday is Matthew 21:28-32. Here’s the homily:

When Katharine Drexel was only in her 20s, she was one of the wealthiest and most influential women of her time. Born in Philadelphia right after the Civil War, Katie Drexel was the daughter of a wealthy international banker—in fact, the family firm grew into the Wall Street powerhouse known today as Drexel Burnham Lambert. But her parents also taught her how to be generous and compassionate with wealth—“money is loaned to us to be shared with others”, her father reminded her.

A turning point in Katie’s life was a family holiday to the western United States. She saw Native Americans mistreated and living in extreme poverty. She witnessed the plight of African-Americans living in unimaginable squalor and dehumanised by the brutality of institutionalised racism. The young heiress became a major benefactor of the missions in the American south and west. But her greatest gift was herself.

In 1887, Katherine Drexel met Pope Leo XXIII. In their private audience, she told the Pope of her concern for the plight of the Indian and Negro communities and asked if he could recommend a religious order that worked with these overlooked minorities that she could support. Impressed by her passion for the cause, the Pope responded, “Why don’t you become a missionary yourself?” The Pope’s challenge was all she needed to hear. In 1889, at the age of 30, the heiress to the Drexel fortune entered the Sisters of Mercy. Two years later, she founded her own religious community, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Besides the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Mother Katharine and her sisters took a fourth vow: “to be the mother and servant of the Indian and Negro races.”

Mother Katharine Drexel used the income from her father’s trust—$350,000 a year in the early 1900s—to build over 100 schools in the rural west and south, including Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historically Catholic black college in the United States. She also fought for civil rights, taking on the Ku Klux Klan, and funding investigations into the exploitation of black workers. At the time of her death in 1955, it is estimated that Mother Katharine Drexel had given more than $21 million to help found churches, schools and hospitals across the United States. Today she is a candidate for sainthood. Blessed Katharine Drexel is a woman who put her money—and her life—where her heart was.

Katharine Drexel’s life reflects the two lessons of today’s gospel: the authority of deeds over words and the holiness that resides within every person as a child of God. Jesus is quite clear: promises can never take the place of performance; words can never be a substitute for deeds. Jesus demands that we who would be his disciples give voice to our faith not just in the prayers, devotions, and rituals we utter but in the good we do and encourage, the businesses we support and the political candidates we uphold, and the relationships we form with one another. Throughout the gospels, Jesus also warns us not to be too quick to gauge people according to our own (and often dubious) standards. Christ calls us to look beyond labels and stereotypes like “tax collectors” and “prostitutes” and recognise, instead, the holiness that resides within every person, who is, like us, a child of God.

Another example. After the First World War, when Communism swept across Russia into the Baltic states, and Estonia was inundated, a hundred Christian leaders in the city of Dorpat were arrested and sentenced to death. They remembered that on the last night of Jesus’ earthly life he instituted the eucharist. The men asked Pastor Hahn, their spiritual leader, to conduct such a final service for them. Fearlessly, he went to the commander and asked to minister to the condemned men. “If these people are crazy enough to want this, and if you’re foolish enough to grant their request, we have no objection, said the commander. “But if you go into that prison you can never come out again. You must suffer their fate.” Astounded, the pastor fled to his home, where he agonised in prayer to know what God expected of him. The decision came, and he bade his wife farewell. Instinctively she knew it was not just a casual goodbye but also a final one. She begged him not to leave her. A writer wrote of Pastor Hahn: “The brave servant of God freed himself from her frantic grasp as gently as he could and then, filled with the Holy Spirit, went directly to the prison, gave the hundred captives there the Lord’s Supper, and was shot down with them.”

Such a man as Pastor Hahn was not of a vacillating mind; his attitude was set dead ahead on doing God’s will. And such a man are we called to imitate in our following of Christ.

It’s easy to tell whether we’re a follower of Jesus or just an admirer: look in the mirror and see what’s moving—your mouth or your feet.