Feast day: July 14
St. Kateri Tekakwitha
Mohawk-Algonquin woman, scarred and half-blinded by smallpox, who converted at 19, endured rejection by her village, and lived a short life of radiant prayer.
Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 at Ossernenon, in the Mohawk lands of what is now upstate New York, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and a Christian Algonquin mother. When she was about four, a smallpox epidemic swept her village, killing her parents and little brother and leaving her an orphan — her own face badly scarred and her eyesight permanently damaged, so that she was given the name Tekakwitha, often rendered 'she who bumps into things.'
Raised by relatives hostile to Christianity, she nevertheless was drawn to the faith when missionaries came among her people, and at about twenty she was baptized, taking the name Kateri after St. Catherine of Siena. Her conversion brought ridicule and persecution from her own village, where she was mocked, threatened, and treated as an outcast for refusing to work on Sundays and for her life of prayer and chastity.
To live her faith freely she made a daring escape, traveling some two hundred miles on foot and by canoe to a Christian Native community at Kahnawake, near Montreal. There she flourished — making a private vow of perpetual virginity, an unheard-of step for a Mohawk woman, and giving herself to prayer, penance, and care for the sick and elderly.
Her health, never strong, failed early, and she died at Kahnawake in 1680, only twenty-four years old. Witnesses said that minutes after her death the smallpox scars vanished from her face, which became radiant. Known as the 'Lily of the Mohawks,' she was canonized in 2012, the first Native American saint, and is honored as a patron of ecology and of indigenous peoples.
Witnesses at her death swore her smallpox scars vanished within minutes — the 'Lily of the Mohawks' is the first Native American saint.
“Who can tell me what is most pleasing to God, that I may do it?”
— St. Kateri Tekakwitha
Image: Father Claude Chauchetière, S.J. (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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