Memorial of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Virgin
“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.” (Mt 11:25)
St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) was born of a Mohawk father and Catholic Algonquin mother in Ossernenon (today Auriesville, NY) in 1656, just ten years after St. Isaac Jogues and St. Jean de Lalande were martyred in that same village. From the time that she was very young, her mother told her stories about Jesus, Mary, and the Catholic Faith. Her mother and father died of small pox when St. Kateri was only four years old, but with her amazing memory, St. Kateri remembered the beautiful stories for years, even though the family members who raised her wanted nothing to do with Christianity. The small pox that had taken her parents left poor Kateri with scars on her face and poor eye-sight. Due to her bad vision she was given the name Tekakwitha, which some translate as “The One Who Walks Groping for Her Way.”
St. Kateri stood out in a unique way from an early age. Her family made the customary arrangements for a marriage when she was still a girl, but she determined that she would not get married at all. When a new French Jesuit missionary was permitted in the village, she wanted to learn from him more about the stories that she remembered from her mother about Christianity. Finally, her family gave their reluctant permission, and she received baptism at the age of 20. Because of the associations of Christianity with the Mohawks’ political enemies and with family tensions, it was especially courageous for St. Kateri to be baptized. Many of her neighbors treated her so poorly that about a year later she moved to Kahnawake, a village outside of Montreal, where she was able to grow in her faith. In Kahnawake, others began to notice the tremendous peace of St. Kateri when she prayed, and they would want to gather next to her when she would pray. The whole town was gathered when she was dying from ill health at the age of 24, and all testified that when she died, the scars on her face from contracting smallpox twenty years earlier all disappeared.
There is much that we, like her neighbors in Kahnawake, have to learn from the child-like faith of St. Kateri that made her so courageous and deeply united to God in prayer. We may address her today with the short prayer of Pope Benedict at her canonization in 2012: “Saint Kateri, Protectress of Canada and the first native American saint, we entrust to you the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in all of North America!” May the Lord give us faith like St. Kateri!