It was less than a year since her mother, Emma Bouvier Drexell, had died, her step-mom really. Katharine was just two months old when her birth mother passed away. She was well into adolescence before she came to know that blessed Emma, a kind and loving mother, was not the woman who had brought her into the world.
If you think you recognize Emma's maiden name, you do so because of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy. The Drexells, like the Bouviers, were true bluebloods, all-American royalty, silver spoon variety. Her father, an investment banker, was among the richest of the rich in the late decades of the 19th century. You'll have to trust me when I say the family's profound Catholic faith kept the haughtiness of some of the rich at bay. The Francis Anthony Drexell family was as kind and gracious and loving as anyone could imagine or experience. Quite simply, they were wonderful people.
But they had lots and lots of money. Katharine, the second of the three Drexell daughters, was 25 when her mother died, and the loss was devastating--to all. Her father determined that an extended vacation to Europe might aid the grieving. Europe meant Italy for sure, and Rome, and even with the Pope a given.
If you stand in the Piazza San Marco in Venice most any time of year, you'll witness more pictures being taken in five minutes than were taken in the first whole century of photography. Everyone carries a phone and uses it; and tens of thousands of tourists shoot a thousand snapshots because the Piazza cannot really be easily described. The wealth required to build the place goes far beyond imagination.
And this is but half of it.
In November of 1883, the Drexells visited here, and Katharine looked up on a statue of the Madonna and child, in all likelihood the one on the clock tower. When she did, miraculously but maybe not surprisingly, she saw the face of her mother, Emma, who had only recently left them.
Silly maybe, but give Katharine the dignity of her deep faith and the space to grieve the loss of a loving mother. Right here, on the Piazza San Marco, Katharine Drexell saw her mom once again; and her mother spoke to her from behind Mary's gracious smile and gaze. "Freely you have been given," her mother said to her, "freely give."
Katharine Drexell bought a souvenir card somewhere on the Piazza that day, and on it she wrote the date the vision had been given, "November 18, 1883." That card she carried along with her for all of her life.
Just more than a year ago, I stood in the Piazza San Marco. I may well have looked up at the same clock tower and the same Madonna and Child. When you're there, the place takes your breath away.
But I wish I'd have known the story of Katharine Drexell standing there in the plaza about a 150 years earlier, wish I would have known the wisdom her mother spoke because Katharine Drexell's life mission was extraordinary.
Not far from the banks of the Missouri River, at a place where it stepladders through its own massive hills, sits a little tiny town named Marty, SD, named after a famous South Dakota bishop. Out there stands an astounding church in the middle of nowhere, a church you have see to believe--St. Paul's Catholic, a place that serves the Yankton Sioux reservation all around.
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| St. Paul's, Marty, South Dakota |
That huge and beautiful church is there today because once upon a time a woman named Katharine Drexell heard her mother speak through a marble statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, on the Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy. "Freely you have been given, freely give."
And there's so much more.
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