Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, known as "the Lily of the Mohawks," is the first Native American canonized saint of the Catholic Church. Born to a Mohawk father and Algonquin Christian mother in 1656, she was orphaned by smallpox in childhood, converted to Catholicism at age twenty, lived a brief life of prayer and penance, and died at twenty-four. Her purity, her perseverance under family hostility, and her brief consecrated life made her the principal Catholic indigenous saint of North America.

Early life among the Mohawks

Tekakwitha was born in 1656 at Ossernenon, a Mohawk village along the Mohawk River in what is now upstate New York (modern Auriesville). Her father was a Mohawk chief, her mother an Algonquin who had been baptized Catholic at the French Catholic mission at Trois-Rivières before being captured and adopted into the Mohawk community.

When Tekakwitha was four years old, a smallpox epidemic swept through her village. The disease killed her father, her mother, and her younger brother. Tekakwitha survived but was permanently scarred: her face was pockmarked and her eyesight severely damaged. The name she eventually was given by her people, Tekakwitha, means "she who bumps into things," referring to her impaired vision. She was raised by her uncle (a Mohawk chief deeply hostile to Christianity) and her two aunts.

The Jesuit mission and conversion

In 1666, when Tekakwitha was ten, French Catholic forces (Carignan-Salières Regiment) burned the Mohawk villages, including Ossernenon, in retaliation for years of Mohawk raids on the French Catholic communities of New France. The Mohawks were forced into a peace treaty that, among other terms, required them to accept Catholic missionaries among them. From 1667 onward, Jesuit missionaries (the so-called Blackrobes) were present in the Mohawk villages.

In 1675, when Tekakwitha was nineteen, the Jesuit Father Jacques de Lamberville arrived at her village. She was already known among her people for her quiet manner, her industry, and her refusal of the marriages her uncle attempted to arrange. Through Father de Lamberville she received catechetical instruction, and she was baptized on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1676, taking the baptismal name Kateri (the Mohawk form of Catherine, in honor of Saint Catherine of Siena).¹

Persecution and flight

Kateri's conversion brought immediate persecution from her family. Her uncle, who had hoped she would marry to consolidate Mohawk family alliances, opposed her baptism. The community held her to be a religious traitor. She was insulted publicly, denied food on Sundays (when she refused to work), stoned by youths, and threatened with torture.

In 1677, with the help of Catholic Mohawks and a friendly Oneida convert who served as a guide, Kateri fled two hundred miles north to the Catholic Mohawk mission at Kahnawake (then called Sault Saint-Louis), on the Saint Lawrence River across from Montreal. There she joined a community of Mohawk Catholic converts under the spiritual direction of the Jesuit fathers.

Life at Kahnawake

For the three years she lived at Kahnawake (1677-1680), Kateri pursued an intense life of prayer, penance, and labor. She prayed for hours at the mission chapel, made her First Communion on Christmas Day 1677, and performed extreme penances in the Catholic ascetic tradition: long fasts, exposure to cold, scourging, and the use of a cilice (a barbed iron chain worn under the clothes). The Jesuits worried about her physical health under these austerities and counseled moderation.

In March 1679, Kateri pronounced a private vow of perpetual virginity, an unprecedented act among the Catholic indigenous women of Canada (Mohawk culture made no provision for unmarried women). She also tried to found a community of consecrated Mohawk virgins. The Jesuit fathers, while supportive of her own vocation, advised against an indigenous religious community at this stage; the time for indigenous Catholic religious life would come later (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).

Death and the lily

Kateri's health, never strong since the smallpox, deteriorated through the winter of 1679-1680. She died at Kahnawake on April 17, 1680, Wednesday of Holy Week, at twenty-four years of age. Her last words were Iesos Konoronkwa ("Jesus, I love you"). Witnesses reported that immediately after her death, the smallpox scars on her face disappeared and her face appeared radiant. The Jesuit Father Pierre Cholenec, who knew her well, recorded this in his contemporaneous account.

Kateri's tomb at Kahnawake (now Caughnawaga Mohawk Territory in Quebec) became a pilgrimage site within months of her death. By 1684, the Jesuits were documenting reports of miraculous healings attributed to her intercession.

Beatification and canonization

The cause for Kateri's canonization moved slowly across centuries. She was declared Venerable by Pope Pius XII in 1943, beatified by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1980 (the three-hundredth anniversary year of her death), and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on October 21, 2012, at Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. The canonizing miracle was the medically inexplicable healing of a six-year-old Lummi boy named Jake Finkbonner from a fast-progressing flesh-eating bacterial infection in 2006.

The canonization was an emotional moment for indigenous Catholic communities across North America. Approximately one thousand Native American Catholics from over fifty tribes attended the canonization Mass in Rome.

Patronage and devotion

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha is patron of ecology and the environment (designated by Pope Saint John Paul II), of indigenous peoples, of people in exile (from her flight from her village), of Native Americans, and of those ridiculed for their faith.

Her feast on July 14 is celebrated as an Optional Memorial in the universal Catholic Church and as a Memorial in the United States and Canada.

The National Shrine of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha at Fonda, New York (the relocated site of Ossernenon, her birthplace), and the Saint Francis Xavier Mission at Kahnawake (where she died and is buried) are the principal Catholic pilgrimage sites associated with her. Her relics are preserved at Kahnawake.

For the related modern American Catholic saint, see Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. For the broader Catholic understanding of What is the Communion of Saints?, see the related learn page.

Sources

Footnotes

1. The principal early biographies are by the Jesuit fathers who knew Kateri personally: Claude Chauchetière, La vie de la B. Catherine Tegakouita, dite à présent la sainte sauvagesse (1696), and Pierre Cholenec, La vie de Catherine Tegakouita (1696). Modern critical biography: Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩