Saint of the week: Kateri Tekakwitha

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She's the very first canonized Native saint, but you don’t often hear many details about Kateri-Tekakwitha’s heroic love of Jesus. Her life remains quiet and hidden, maybe even a little elusive. Yet her heroic heart bears the unmistakable marks of someone wholly given to God.

Born in 1656 in what is now upstate New York, Tekakwitha grew up as the daughter of the Mohawk chief. She first learned about God from her mother, who was an Algonquin Christian. At age 4, she lost her parents to a smallpox epidemic that also left her own face pitted with scars and damaged her eyesight. Tekakwitha went into the care of her uncle, who rose as the new chief. He opposed Christian conversion, and for many years fear of his wrath prevented Tekakwitha from seeking further growth in her faith.

But finally, at age 19 she found her courage: she refused a compulsory marriage, sought catechetical instruction from nearby Jesuit missionaries, and was baptized on Easter 1676. She took the baptismal name "Kateri"—a Native modification of "Catherine," after St Catherine of Siena. Her uncle grew so hostile that he began treating her as a slave and denying her food on Sundays because she observed Sundays as days of worship and rest.

Eventually life under her uncle's rule became so difficult that Kateri-Tekakwitha left her village and walked 200 miles to join a community of other Native American Christians. Think of that—200 miles, by foot—and think of how many of us moderns complain about going to Mass in air-conditioned churches every Sunday.

As a Christian, Kateri-Tekakwitha retained her Native perspective; she often incorporated Mohawk and Iroquois spiritual practices in her life of prayer and sacrifice. Like many Native people, she lived very close to nature, obtaining almost every necessity from clothing to food to household objects from the natural world around her. Even before becoming Christian, she saw creation as precious and sacred for its relationship to sustaining life itself. This view was deeply enriched by her belief that creation was also a personal gift from a God who loved her.

She lived out the rest of her life with the community as a faithful daughter of the Church. She served the community with simple chores, doing what needed to be done. Her skills included exceptional prowess in sewing clothes, weaving mats, and cooking. She spent long hours of silent prayer in the forest, tracing crosses in the patterns of tree bark. She chose celibacy in a time and culture that didn't understand it: “I am not my own; I have given myself to Jesus. He must be my only love.” Kateri-Tekakwitha and her friend Marie Thérèse Tegaianguenta, another Native Christian, attempted to found a religious order for Native women, but it was not approved.

Just before Easter in 1680, Kateri-Tekakwitha died at age 24. Witnesses reported that immediately upon death, her smallpox scars cleared. In the weeks that followed, she appeared mystically to at least three friends. Veneration of her as a saintly witness began as early as 1684. In 1724, the first convent explicitly for Native women opened in Mexico under her patronage.

Kateri-Tekakwitha did not leave us great writings or hospitals or institutions, but the “Lily of the Mohawks" gave us an even greater treasure: a path, like one that might wind through a dense forest, toward communion with God.

Her feast is July 14.

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