Saint Camillus de Lellis founded a religious order that cares for the sick all over the world. But in the United States, his feast day is translated to another date so that Americans can honor Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.1 Has the Catholic Church given in to contemporary pressure for political correctness? Is the promotion of Saint Kateri just a Catholic excuse to remember indigenous peoples and environmental concerns? Is there anything truly remarkable about a young native American Catholic who died a virgin but not a martyr?
The essentials of her life story are well known. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and her mother was a Christian from the Algonquin tribe. She was born in 1656 in Ossernenon (now Auriesville, New York), followed by her younger brother. When she was four years old, the members of her immediate family and many members of her village died from smallpox. Like some people who survive smallpox, her face was left covered with scars, and her eyesight was permanently damaged.
Two of her aunts from another village rescued the orphaned girl and adopted her. That’s when she was given the name of Tekakwitha, which is variously translated as “one who bumps into things” or “one who puts things in order.” Whatever the precise meaning it had for the members of her clan, the name teaches us that what her community most noticed about the young girl was the way she behaved because of her impaired vision.
Jesuit missionaries evangelized the people of her village from the time she was small, but it wasn’t until Tekakwitha was nineteen years old that she was baptized and took the Christian name of Catherine, or Kateri. A year later, she traveled two hundred miles to live in a village of native American Catholics in Sault Saint-Louis (now Kahnawake, Quebec), Canada. Before her premature death a few years later, she inspired other Christians through her example of Christian purity, modesty, and prayer.
While this simple version of Kateri’s story is certainly true, it does not explain why she deserves the title of saint. However, it is easy to see that there were at least five pivotal moments in Kateri’s life, which ultimately led her to Christ and to sainthood.
The first turning point began before Kateri was born. Her mother, Kahenta, did not leave her Algonquin family willingly. It was a common practice of men from the Mohawk tribe to kidnap women from other tribes. Kahenta was also a Christian, like many in her village. After she was abducted from her family, married into the Mohawks, and became a mother, Kahenta naturally wanted to pass on her faith to her daughter. She taught Kateri about the one true God, unlike the pagan gods who were worshipped by that tribe, and she taught her how to pray. Somehow, even though her mother died when Kateri was only four years old, her words about God remained in Kateri’s heart.
The second important event in Kateri’s life was that devastating outbreak of smallpox.2 Smallpox took the lives of her loved ones and gave her a lifelong disability. However, those who knew her as a child said she was a quiet but happy girl. Despite the tragedies of her life, she did not resent her limited eyesight and smallpox scars, despair of her future, or nourish hatred for the Frenchmen who were blamed for the outbreak.
The third important period of Kateri’s life occurred over several years as she grew up in a Mohawk village. While there were and are many noble traditions among the native American peoples, there were also traditions that can only be described as sinful or even demonic. The native American tribes frequently fought one another, and the Mohawks had a reputation for aggressive behavior. Besides kidnapping women as potential wives, they also captured the men they defeated in battle. It was a common practice for these enemy warriors to be tortured to death in unspeakably brutal ways.
Was it Kateri’s gentle nature that caused her to hide when native Americans were being tortured and killed in her village? Or was it God speaking to her heart, convicting her of the Christian call to love our enemies, not hate them? Mohawk children were encouraged to join in the torment of their captured enemies, but, for whatever reason, Kateri refused.
Even though she had not been baptized, there are other signs of Christ working in Kateri’s heart. For example, she somehow seemed to know that she was not called to marriage, even when her adoptive family nagged her and tried to trick her into one. As Saint Peter discovered, sometimes the Holy Spirit can show up even before baptism,3 and perhaps it was the Holy Spirit who gave Kateri the strength to refuse her family’s constant attempts to make her marry and instead remain a virgin, contrary to her tribe’s culture.
The fourth pivotal moment of her life occurred when Kateri was eighteen years old. The shy woman had been pondering what she had overheard about Jesus Christ from missionary priests for years when French Jesuit priest Jacques de Lamberville came to her village. Out of the blue, she asked him if she could be baptized. After a period of study, he baptized her on Easter Sunday. He also tried to prepare her for the reality of living as a Christian in a pagan society.
Because of her decision to become a Christian, Kateri’s position in the tribe changed overnight. She was threatened, stoned, and denied food. A woman falsely started a rumor that Kateri was having an affair with her husband. Even those closest to her rejected her. Other than infrequent visits by priests, there were no Christians to whom she could turn for support or advice.
That’s when she entered the fifth and final phase of her life. After secretly running away from her village, she traveled by boat and on foot to a community of native Americans that had been established by the Jesuits. Here she was finally able to regularly receive the sacraments, develop Christian friendships, and be part of a community of her own people, all of whom had sacrificed to become followers of Christ, just as she had. She prayed for those she had left behind, but she also practiced physical mortifications for them, hoping that her sacrifices would open their hearts to the Gospel. These mortifications were so severe that they probably led to her premature death. But she wanted her family and friends to be free of paganism and its cruel rituals, free of their addiction to alcohol and sin, and free to embrace Jesus Christ.
Kateri did not die a martyr or found a religious order or even turn back from a life of grave sin. Instead, she demonstrated great truths by living them out: that the message of the Gospel is a message that can be grasped by mere children; that forgiveness brings healing; that the Holy Spirit speaks to those who listen; that being persecuted is simply part of being a Christian; and that we should make sacrifices for those who reject the Gospel. She did not perform one great, heroic act, but made little choices for Christ every day.
As for the mystery of how Saint Kateri seemed to know her vocation as a virgin—long before baptism and even before she had heard of the existence of Catholic nuns—perhaps it is not such a great mystery. Almost exactly ten years before Kateri was born, in a Mohawk village not far from her birthplace, the French Jesuit Isaac Jogues was tortured and killed,4 dying a martyr for the people he had dedicated his life to evangelize.
As the early Church Father Tertullian boldly told his pagan opponents, “The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.”5 Perhaps the seed sown by Saint Isaac Jogues came to flower in the life of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks,” a Catholic virgin who deserves the title of saint in any time and place.
Endnotes:
1 Saint Kateri’s feast day is held on July 14 in the US but is held in Canada on April 17, the date of her death.
2 Today, Europeans are often blamed for the deaths of native Americans during the colonial period. Since native peoples had not developed any immunity to smallpox, the percentage of native deaths from this disease was high. However, Europeans did not bring smallpox to the New World as a bioweapon; quite a few of them died from the disease themselves. For that matter, many European children died or were orphaned by smallpox long before the seventeenth century and before it was declared eradicated by the WHO in 1980.
3 See Acts 10:1-48.
4 Saint Isaac Jogues’ killers were so impressed with his courage during brutal tortures that they consumed his heart. Cannibalism was a not uncommon part of these rituals.
5 Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, S. Thelwall, trans., Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, no. 50.
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Sainthood for the Mohawk St. Kateri Tekakwitha was confirmed by a medical miracle gifted in 2006 to a six-year-old boy suffering from the flesh-eating bacteria. Jake Finkbonner is a half-Lummi Native American from near the Canadian border who was hospitalized in Seattle Children’s Hospital.
His local story and pictures appeared in the Archdiocese of Seattle bi-monthly magazine in 2020:
https://nwcatholic.org/news/jean-parietti/the-miracle-boy