The auction at the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament’s building started at 9 a.m., and I sat through a long tedious online sale and five rooms of an on-site sale.
That’s how bad I wanted a bronze-finish plaster/resin sculpture of an Africa American woman and baby – a modern Black Madonna. I don’t usually hang around auctions that long anymore. But I couldn’t resist the sculpture: It embodied what Saint Katharine and the nuns of her order stood for and worked for – African Americans, Native Americans and other ethnic people.
I loved the image, even though I knew the sculpture wasn’t worth much money and was purely decorative. The word “ECILA” was etched into its back, along with some words I could barely make out.
Later, I learned that it was titled “Treasured Moment,” sculpted by artist Alice Heath and manufactured by Austin Sculpture in 1995. Heath apparently designed many sculptures for the company.
The one-day auction came three years after the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament announced that it would close and sell its 44-acre property in Bucks County, PA, northeast of Philadelphia. The property with its 10 buildings was sold last year, and items were dispersed in three auctions starting in 2017.
Some of the 200 items at this auction bore labels with the names of donors and the sisters to whom they were donated or to the order itself. They included prints and paintings; furniture and trunks used by the sisters; stained-glass windows; dinnerware; Native American, Haitian and African items (most of them modern), a fully made bed with a hand-sewn quilt, and a Nativity scene.
Auction-goers meandered through rooms in one building, where old-world pocket ceilings of dark mahogany wood contrasted with contemporary drop-ceiling tiles in the hallways. Items were placed atop furniture in sparsely filled rooms and on windowsills, paintings were stacked against walls and hung on walls, and small ethnic items were laid out on tables. Much of it – donated and personal – was indicative of what the order represented.
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament was founded by Katharine Drexel who was born in 1858 into a rich Philadelphia family and a life of comfort. While nursing her stepmother during an illness, she realized that money could not solve all problems.
She saw firsthand the poverty experienced by Native Americans when she journeyed west in 1884, and she felt a pressing need to help. Her family had long assisted the destitute, and she and her sisters gave money to a mission on a reservation in South Dakota.
During a European tour, she met Pope Leo XIII and asked him to send missionaries to Wyoming to help Native Americans. He suggested that she become a missionary. When she returned to the United States, she embarked on her new mission: to serve, assist and minister to poor Native and African Americans. She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891.
Over the years, Mother Drexel’s order built Catholic schools for both groups and established numerous missions. In 1925, she and the sisters founded the first Catholic university for black students, Xavier University in New Orleans. (At the auction, two chairs with emblems for the university were sold.)
Mother Drexel died in 1955 at the age of 96. She was canonized as a saint in 2000.
As the sisters in Saint Katharine’s order aged, their numbers dwindled. Once the property was sold, the sisters – about 80 of them – moved into a senior community in Northeast Philadelphia. Her remains were enshrined at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia last year.
The new owners plan to build townhouses and a variety of senior-living apartments. The developers said after a zoning hearing recently that some of the historical buildings would remain.
The money raised from the three auctions is expected to be used to care for the nuns and continue their ministry.
The auction drew dealers, private buyers and others associated with the order and its ministry. The online sale produced some of the highest bids, including a circa 1780 tall case clock, $2,000 (without the 25 percent buyer’s premium); an oak tall chest with beautiful black decorative pulls, $1,200, to a buyer who said he’d used it to hold his “extensive watch collection”; stained-glass windows ranging from $900 to $3,000, and a Steinway & Sons grand piano, $16,000.
The items in the on-site sale went for considerably less – sometimes for 5 bucks, singly and in groups. I bought the mother and baby, along with two beautiful black-and-white vintage photographs-on-board of black children. The photos were unsigned; I’d love to know the name of the photographer.
