Save Cornwells Heights
Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006
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The True Story of Saint Katharine Drexel and Cornwells Heights
It’s
Easter now. I’ve tried to make it a
policy on this website to take a step back when great days or momentous events
eclipse the simple matters of riding trains, setting fares, and checking
schedules. The train stories, for those
inquiring, are available in the archives. Some days it’s more important to think of
other things, and there seems to me to be no better day than this to revisit a
story of Cornwells Heights I first mentioned on August
30th, 2005, that of the Saint and the Station. I knew little about Saint Katharine Drexel
then. I know much more now, but not
nearly so much as I will know in another month or another year or ten, for I
very much want to continue to learn of the marvelous skein of connections
between America’s newest Saint and the trains that stop at the foot of her
hill, called Cornwells Heights.
Saint?!? What Saint?
To
bring the curious reader quickly up to speed, a genuine Roman Catholic Saint
lies in her shrine about a hundred yards up the hill from the main, large
parking lot at the Cornwells Heights train station. The land of the station was once hers. On October 1st, 2000, when Pope John Paul II canonized
Saint Katharine Drexel, the media generally reported her to be the “second
American-born saint” after Saint Elizabeth Seton whose shrine is at Emmitsburg,
Maryland. But I’ve done a little
research, and through no fault of her own, it appears Saint Elizabeth was born
a subject of the British crown in 1774; was probably trying to stand upright at
the time of the battles of Lexington and Concord; and was most likely toddling
quite nicely when the Declaration of Independence was signed at Philadelphia on
July 4th, 1776. Katharine
Drexel of Cornwells Heights, born in 1858 in Philadelphia, is, indeed, the only
saint ever born a citizen of the United States of America. We’re on her land, and therein lies an
Easter story.
So What Is the Story
of Saint Katharine?
In a
nutshell, she was a fabulously wealthy 19th century heiress whose
religious convictions led her to take a vow of poverty, became a nun, establish
her own religious order, and use her wealth and her order to care for and
educate Blacks and American Indians from the late 1800’s even to this day. Long before the American Civil Rights
Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s began, there was Mother Katharine Drexel of
Cornwells Heights founding roughly 100 schools and missions for Blacks and
Indians throughout the United States.
And the crown jewel of it all was Xavier University in New Orleans,
begun in 1915, the only Black Catholic University in America.
The
daughter of a tremendously wealthy banker, she was raised in a home where
spiritual devotion was the core of her and her family’s life. She was taught from an early age that the
gift of wealth her family had received was to be used first and foremost for
good works and deeds. When her mother
died young, and her father followed two years after, she and her sisters were
left with $14 million in a trust fund.
In 1885, that was really, really big money. All three sisters used the money for good
works, and all three built schools in various places, their top priorities
being orphans, Blacks, and Indians.
But
Katharine needed more. For a few years,
she traveled and gave money to support and establish Catholic Indian missions
throughout the U.S., but then she made a fateful trip to Rome. In an audience with Pope Leo XIII, she asked
him for more priests to be sent to the American Indian missions. The answer then that rocked her soul was,
“Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?” Long having thought of becoming a nun, she first thought to join
a “contemplative order” devoted entirely to worship and prayer while leaving
her fortune to established Indian welfare agencies. But her closest spiritual advisor, the Bishop of Omaha (formerly
stationed at Holmesburg, PA; hence the connection), first advised and then
insisted that the most good would come not from assorted half-hearted agencies
sharing the wealth, but from a new religious order which she must found and
direct for the good of America’s Blacks and Indians. Like all good heroes and heroines, she at first shrank from the
idea in near terror. As if it were not
enough to vow poverty, give away her fortune, and submit her whole life to a
new order and a Mother Superior, suddenly she was expected to become
a Mother Superior as well, and she felt herself ever so inadequate to the
job. Not alone in her decision, but
with the encouragement of her closest advisors (and over the objections of many
others close to her), she accepted it as “the will of God” that she must face
the task and do it, and trusted that He would show her the way. She was nearly 31 when she took her vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience; and barely 32 – and desperately concerned
about one of her mission settlements surviving the aftermath of the Wounded
Knee massacre just 11 days before – when she officially became Sister Katharine
of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the first member of her own new order.
Who and Where Are the
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament Today?
Well,
some are spread throughout our country at missions and schools. But many of them, especially the oldest and
the infirm, are just a
stone’s throw up the hill from our big parking lot at Cornwells
Heights. Some that are there now even
knew and worshiped with Saint Katharine before her death at 96 in 1955 (just
about the same time some poor lab rabbit died for me, if you know what I
mean!). The convent on the hill, the
Motherhouse of the Sisters of the
Blessed Sacrament, is now in large part a nursing home for those who worked
without fanfare, quietly, patiently through the 20th century for the
education, civil rights, and faith that Mother Katharine gave her dreams and
her life to. I doubt that many
Americans realize how much of what we hold dear and proud about our country and
its most cherished ideals today has come down to us from Cornwells Heights’
lady on the hill.
If
you’ve ever wondered what buildings looking a lot like part of an old Spanish
mission are doing in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, not far from our cars and trains,
they’re there to be muy simpatico with the Spanish Indian missions of
the old American West. And Saint
Katharine rests below the cross on the little dome to the left.
Is There a Train Story
Somewhere in All of This?
You bet
there is! It’s no accident that Mother
Katharine’s convent, her spiritual home, her Motherhouse, is on the hill above
the station, and that our parking lot was once her back yard. She put the convent there; she built it
there to be with the station.
As best
I understand the history of Cornwells Heights, the railroad came through as a
right of way with trains on it even before Katharine Drexel was born. There was a stop there called simply
“Cornwells” after an old man named Thomas
Cornwell who died in 1839 (and was only “rediscovered” about two years ago
in the cemetery at the top of Station Avenue) and presumably owned or worked on
land around the station even before the railroad arrived. The community that developed on the hill
above the station and near the convent then became known as “Cornwells
Heights,” and that name in turn migrated back to the station.
There
is a little road to nowhere on the convent grounds today, a road that starts
out well enough branching off from the Bristol Pike (Route 13) into the convent
grounds, but after a certain point it dissolves into the customary urban soup
of sand, leaves, and crumbling asphalt that old, untraveled paths become after
fifty years of neglect. The nuns’ road
to the station was cut off in the 1950’s by I-95, but once it ran straight down
B Section of PennDOT Lot 1. And the
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament went down to the trains and out to America,
and sometimes they came back for missions more in health, and sometimes they
came back to die.
The
four stops of the SEPTA
R7 Line from Holmesburg Junction up to Eddington were the spiritual
corridor of Saint Katharine Drexel’s
life.
At
Torresdale she spent some of the happiest days of her youth at the summer home
her family called St. Michel (St. Michael) which also served as her order’s
first Motherhouse and has now become a quaint appendage attached to the back of
the Frankford-Torresdale Hospital complex, visible only from the circuitous
common exit road that drains the hospital’s several parking lots. It was from Torresdale that she and her
family took their private rail car on her first tour of the American West.
At
Holmesburg she met Father James O’Connor, the man who guided her spiritual life
from youth to the beginning of her order.
It was he who advised her for many years to keep herself “in the world,
but not of it” until she battered him into submission, at which point he not
only caved in on the issue of her becoming a nun, but commanded her to found
her own order.
At
Cornwells Heights she found the acreage she needed for her convent and the
train station she needed to send herself and her nuns out on missions and into
the world.
And at Eddington
her sister Elizabeth established an industrial school for orphans grown too old
for the orphanages. Elizabeth died in
childbirth before Saint Katharine’s Motherhouse was built, and so the
Motherhouse came to be named St. Elizabeth’s in memory of the sister lost.
I
received a very poignant note from an old railroad man shortly after I
published my first few thoughts on Saint Katharine last August. He wrote me that the even older railroad men
he knew long ago passed down the story that Mother Katharine had deeded some of
her land to the railroad for the Cornwells Heights station with the stipulation
that the station be kept open for all time, that the children of Philadelphia
should always be able to come to her convent.
Indeed, the Sisters once ran a school for them there. I’m a bit afraid to look up the actual deed,
though, as urban legends often turn to mist, but in a way, it’s even more
important that the old men of the railroad believed that Mother Drexel and the
station were inseparable. Perhaps, in a
way, they are.
There’s Another Train Story,
and I Don’t Know Where It Ends.
Sometimes
in life, you get inside a story without even knowing it until you look
back. And sometimes you look back and
say, “Wow! What the heck was that?”
Last August
and September, I at first thought I was inside a story of my own making about
saving an Amtrak stop at a small station in Pennsylvania. But no sooner had I started the project and
this website than a tropical storm named Katrina became a hurricane, and
perspectives changed, and for a few days I couldn’t write about trains, so I
wrote of a storm and of prayers from a spot farther down in me and aching. I recalled the bittersweet song of America’s
disappearing trains, The City of New Orleans. I noticed, almost in passing, a saint on a hill. And even later I recalled with irony the
famous, staple song of the City of New Orleans, When the Saints Go Marching
In. As I wrote in my sincere but blatant attempt to interest President Bush in
the “faith-based” spiritual side of the Cornwells Heights saga, “For me, the
storm and the saint and the station and the songs and the trains and the city
all became one very strange blur of meanings and thoughts last September.” And so it was, and so it is, that like 9/11,
which I also witnessed and have tried to understand,
there was a brew of thoughts and passions in my September that seemed to fit
together in an almost unpredictably, incomprehensibly perfect way.
But
there was another story on the hill in those September days, and I’m still
learning what it was and is. Xavier
University in New Orleans, the crown jewel of Saint Katharine Drexel’s
spiritual dreams, sat square in the path of the hurricane, behind levees that
might not hold. Many students evacuated
in time, and some of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament returned from there
to the Motherhouse at Cornwells Heights to bide the storm. But a group of about 250 students, faculty,
staff, and University neighbors ended up caught with no way out, and they chose
to ride out the tempest in Xavier’s hurricane-hardened buildings. At least one Sister of the Blessed Sacrament
was among them. An old man died. The rest survived to be rescued days
later. And when Sister Grace Mary
Flickinger finally came home from New Orleans, she came home to Cornwells
Heights. I’m happy to say, though, that
she’s back in New Orleans now, and the University goes on.
I can
barely imagine the kilo-nun wattage Cornwells Heights must have been emitting
in prayer from states of grace for a
few key days in September. On September
15th, the station was spared by Amtrak,
and though I thought at the time that I had willed it to be, maybe, in a very
strange case of cup-o’-grace-runneth-over, I was just carried along by
footprints in the sand dusting the leaves on that little asphalt road, going
back to the hill from nowhere.
In New
Orleans past and New Orleans present and New Orleans future, there will always
be trombones, snares, and trumpets for When the Saints Go Marching In. But in fact there really was a saint, a
true-blue American saint, once upon a time in New Orleans, and she came
and went and came and went by train long, long ago. I doubt that she “marched,” but perhaps next time she will.
And
there was once long ago a train, run by the Illinois Central, called The
City of New Orleans, and it actually did die and disappear for a short time
just before Amtrak was formed. Amtrak resurrected the
old train with new colors and pretty much the same route it had always
traveled from Chicago to the sea. It’s
my best current understanding that the song The City
of New Orleans was written in the disappearance time to mourn the
train’s passing. But yet it, too,
survived.
Well,
it’s Easter morning now, and the rising sun is telling me I’ve written through
the night, which is enough for now, and perhaps more than anyone will bother to
read. No matter. It felt good just to type until dawn. To explain a bit further, a friend of mine
all but forcibly pressed her copy of a small book into my hands about a year
ago, saying “You really ought to read this, it’s great!” It was Mitch Albom’s The Five People You
Meet In Heaven, and I read it in three days on Amtrak. It turned out to be the most personally
meaningful and powerful book I’ve read in ages, in part because the
protagonist, an old man named Eddie, scarred and “ruined” in his youth by war,
was only a few short and minor edits away from being someone I once knew and
admired and cared about, and whose wounds and daughter I married. It’s a great book, a great story, and I
recommend it for Easter or any day you feel like a trip to one man’s heaven, or
even your own. And so it is that I am
drawn back to the ending sentence of that book to try to somehow close the two
stories of September on the hill called Cornwells Heights, both of which seem
somehow to be chapters of another story.
Consider this final sentence from Mitch Albom’s book to be this Easter
essay’s farewell, and a teaser to go read it.
;-)
“And in
that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who
waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the
secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next,
and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
No
matter what your faith, may this Easter bring you a “rebirth” of spirit and of
hope.
– Rick Booth, rick@savecornwellsheights.com
P.S. And since “Specter Santorum” means quite literally “Ghost of the Saint,” I’m expecting really cool stuff to go down when the Ride of the Senators gets to Cornwells Heights in August. Like they say, you can’t make this stuff up! ;-)
Thank
you, Kim. Thank you, George.
