Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Tekakwitha was born around 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, in what is now New York state, near today's Auriesville. Her father, Kenneronkwa, was a Mohawk chief. Her mother, Kahenta, was an Algonquin and a Christian who had been captured in a raid, adopted into the people, and later married the chief. She had been baptized and taught by French missionaries before her capture, but she died before her children could be baptized.

When Tekakwitha was about four, a smallpox epidemic killed her parents and her younger brother. She survived, but her face was scarred and her eyesight weakened, and she wrapped herself in a shawl to shield her eyes from the sun. She was taken in by her father's sister and her husband, a chief of the Turtle Clan, and she grew up quiet and hardworking, doing household tasks and making small goods from roots and bark that were in demand. Her name has a disputed meaning. Some say it means one who puts things in order, a reference to her skill with her hands; others link it to her poor sight and translate it as one who bumps into things or feels her way along.

French Jesuit missionaries came to her village in 1675, and their accounts of the faith drew her. She converted at nineteen and was baptized on Easter, taking the name Catherine, or Kateri. She had committed herself to remaining a virgin, and her new life brought threats and harassment from people around her. She left her village and moved to the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. There she died five years later, on 17 April 1680, at about twenty-four, respected for her piety and good works.

Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1980, and Pope Benedict XVI canonized her on 21 October 2012, making her the first Native American saint. She is known as the Lily of the Mohawks, and she is honored as a patron of ecology and the environment, of Native Americans, and of people in exile.

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us.