St. Kateri Tekakwitha

St. Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 at Ossernenon, a Mohawk village on the Mohawk River near present-day Auriesville, New York, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and an Algonquin Christian mother. When she was about four years old, a smallpox epidemic killed her parents and infant brother and left her scarred, with badly weakened eyesight; the name Tekakwitha is often rendered 'she who bumps into things.' She was raised by an uncle who opposed the Christian missionaries. As a young woman she quietly resisted the marriages arranged for her, and when Jesuit missionaries came to her village she asked for instruction in the faith her mother had held. She was baptized at about twenty, on Easter of 1676, by Fr. Jacques de Lamberville, taking the name Kateri (Catherine) after St. Catherine of Siena. Her conversion brought ridicule, threats, and harassment in her village, and in 1677 she fled some two hundred miles north to the Jesuit mission of St. Francis Xavier at Sault Saint-Louis, now Kahnawake, near Montreal. At the mission Kateri gave herself to a hidden life of remarkable intensity: daily Mass, long hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, severe penances after the manner of her time, and tender care for the sick and elderly. In 1679 she made a private vow of perpetual virginity, consecrating herself to Christ—an act without precedent among her people. Worn down by illness and austerity, she died on April 17, 1680, at about twenty-four years of age. Witnesses related that within minutes of her death the smallpox scars vanished from her face, leaving it radiantly beautiful, and devotion to the 'Lily of the Mohawks' spread rapidly among both Native peoples and French colonists. Beatified by St. John Paul II in 1980, Kateri was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on October 21, 2012, becoming the first Native American saint. Her feast is celebrated on July 14 in the United States, and she is invoked as a patron of ecology and the environment and of Native Americans. Her relics rest at the St. Francis Xavier Mission church in Kahnawake, Quebec, and pilgrims also honor her at the National Shrine of St. Kateri Tekakwitha in Fonda, New York, and at the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville, near her birthplace.