Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha was a young woman of the Mohawk people who was baptized at the age of twenty, vowed her virginity to God, and spent the rest of her short life in prayer and work at a Jesuit mission near Montreal. She is the first Native North American woman to be canonized. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on April 17.

She was born in 1656 in the village of Ossernenon, today Auriesville in the state of New York. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and her mother was a Christian of the Algonquin people who had been brought up among French settlers at Trois-Rivières and carried off during a war. It was her mother who taught her to pray. When the girl was four years old, a smallpox epidemic took her parents and her younger brother. She herself survived, but the disease left scars on her face and weakened her eyesight. The orphan was taken in by her uncle, one of the chiefs, who was hostile to Christianity.

Her relatives tried several times to give her in marriage, but she firmly refused. When the Jesuit Jacques de Lamberville entered her lodge in 1675, she told him that she wished to be baptized. She received baptism at Easter 1676 and was given the name Catherine, Kateri in her own language.

Baptism brought persecution upon her. She was mocked and even threatened with death. On Father de Lamberville’s advice, in the fall of 1677 she fled, with the help of three Native Christians, to the Saint Francis Xavier Mission on the Saint Lawrence River, across from Montreal. As early as Christmas of that year she was allowed to receive her First Communion, sooner than was customary for the newly baptized.

At the mission she lived as her people did. She worked, and when she went out with the others on the winter hunt, she prayed in the forest before a rough cross she had carved herself. She attended Mass every day, adored the Blessed Sacrament, cared for the sick and the elderly, and taught the children to pray. When here too she was urged to marry, she answered that Jesus was her only spouse. On March 25, 1679, with the consent of her spiritual director, she made a vow of perpetual virginity. As far as is known, no one among the Native peoples of North America had done so before her. She was not able to enter a religious order, and so she remained a laywoman to the end.

She died at the mission on Wednesday of Holy Week, April 17, 1680, at the age of twenty-four. Her last words were, “Jesus, I love you.” The Jesuits Pierre Cholenec and Claude Chauchetière, who knew her, wrote accounts of her life, and pilgrims soon began coming to her grave. The saint’s relics rest today in the Church of Saint Francis Xavier in Kahnawake, near Montreal.

John Paul II, who recalled her old title, the Lily of the Mohawks, beatified her on June 22, 1980, and Benedict XVI canonized her on October 21, 2012, in St. Peter’s Square. On that day he entrusted to her intercession the renewal of the faith among the Native peoples and in all of North America.