SAINTS/HEROES OF NEW YORK SERIES
In 1656, a decade after the death of St. Isaac Jogues, Kateri Tekakwitha was born in Ossernenon, the village near present-day Auriesville, where Jogues was martyred. Her father was a Mohawk chief, her mother an Algonquin Catholic who had been captured and assimilated into the Mohawk people. Her Mohawk name, Tekakwitha, means “she who bumps into things”; the name Kateri, a form of Catherine, was given to her when she converted to Christianity.
When Tekakwitha was 4, a smallpox epidemic swept through Ossernenon. Tekakwitha survived, but the disease killed both her parents and left the girl in poor health, her face scarred and her eyesight significantly impaired. Raised in the family of her aunt, Tekakwitha learned about Christianity from Jesuit missionaries who visited the settlement, and was quickly drawn to the faith.
Through years of upheaval in the region, amid tribal wars and invasions abetted by French and Dutch fur traders, Kateri remained quiet and humble, helping with harvesting and caring for the sick. Despite pressure from her aunts, she insisted that she would not marry. Surrounded by violence and facing her stepfather’s disapproval, she moved steadily toward a devotion to the Christian faith, and at the age of 18 began catechesis with Fr. Jacques de Lamberville, a Jesuit missionary who visited the settlement of Caughnawauga. She was baptized during Holy Week of 1676, taking her baptismal name from St. Catherine of Siena.
Six months later, accused of sorcery by some who opposed her conversion, Tekakwitha journeyed to Kahnawake, a Jesuit mission on the St. Laurence River near Montreal established for the conversion and religious instruction of native people. There Tekakwitha lived in a longhouse with other converted Mohawk, including some she had known in her settlement. Her life of extraordinary devotion to prayer, penance and purity inspired all around her during the few remaining years of her life; she and a friend wished to form a congregation of native women religious, but Tekakwitha did not live long enough to see this through.
Kateri Tekakwitha died at the age of 24 in 1680. Her last words, according to Fr. Claude Chauchetière, were “Jesus, Mary, I love you.” She was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, and is beloved throughout the New York region as patron saint of peace and ecology. The St. Kateri Tekakwitha National Shrine and Historic Site at Caughnawauga, near Fonda, New York, was dedicated to her in 1980.
Reprinted from Archways Magazine | Fall 2020