I was rather taken aback when Rick Santorum called the President a snob for supporting higher education. After all, Santorum was a Catholic, he was not from some peculiar little sect of Know-Nothing Christians, and whatever faults the Catholic Church has, a failure to support education is not one of them. Indeed, when all of Europe had lost interest in educating anyone, rich or poor, the Church was still maintaining schools.
I remembered a Jewish comic on Johnny Carson one night claiming the best school around where he grew up was the local Catholic school, and therefor his parents, along with a lot of other Jewish parents, sent their kids to that school. The punch line was that all the kids ended up calling the school "Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt."
There are a handful of North American Catholic saints. Some of you may have heard of Mother Cabrini, the first American saint, who was born in Italy, came to the US and ministered to Italian immigrants. The first native born American to be canonized was Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, who established the first Catholic school in the nation, as well as founding the Sisters of Charity. And I just happened across a third north American female Saint: Katharine Drexel, whose feast day is today.
She was born in a well-to-do Philadelphia family just before the Civil War, and lived until 1955 (she was 96 when she died). If you're from the area you may have heard of Drexel University, which was founded by her uncle, Anthony Drexel. It is ranked among the top 200 universities in the world.
Katharine was drawn to the American Indians and was moved by Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor, a book about the plight of the native people of America, documenting the violations of treaties by the government and a general disregard for the rights of the original population of the United States. Being very rich and from a prominent family Katharine got a chance to meet Pope Leo XIII and asked for help for the missionaries working with Indians. The pope suggested she might do such a thing herself. Eventually she agreed and took holy orders, establishing the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored. Her order started a lot of schools for both Indians and African-Americans. At the time of her death there were over 500 sisters teaching at 63 schools all over the country.
Carrying on the family tradition, she founded a Catholic university, Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans. It is one of 105 historically black colleges and universities, and aside from awarding bachelor degrees, it has a College of Pharmacy which awards a Doctorate of Pharmacy, as well as a grad school awarding Masters degrees in Education and Theology. The University was visited by Barack Obama in 2010, where he gave a speech on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
So, I can't help but wonder: would Santorum call Saint Katharine Drexel a snob?