Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Virgin

Feast Day

July 14

Life

1656–1680

Canonized

2012

Born

Ossernenon (modern Auriesville, New York), Iroquois Confederacy

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 at the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, in the Iroquois Confederacy of present-day New York State, daughter of a pagan Mohawk chief and a captive Catholic Algonquin mother who had been baptized at Trois-Rivieres. When Kateri was four, a smallpox epidemic killed her parents and infant brother and left her with severely impaired vision and a scarred face; the name Tekakwitha ("she who bumps into things") reflects her near-blindness. She was raised by her uncle, who became chief of the village, now relocated north of the Mohawk River as Caughnawaga (modern Fonda, New York).

At twenty she was baptized by the Jesuit missionary Jacques de Lamberville on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1676, taking the name Kateri (Catherine) after Saint Catherine of Siena. Persecuted by her relatives for her refusal to work on Sundays, her refusal to marry, and her open profession of Christianity, she fled in 1677 about two hundred miles to the Jesuit mission of Saint Francis Xavier at Sault Saint-Louis (Kahnawake) on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River near Montreal.

At Kahnawake she made her First Communion at Christmas 1677 and on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1679, she made a vow of perpetual virginity, the first known among the indigenous peoples of North America. She lived a life of intense prayer, fasting, and severe penances inspired by the Lives of the Saints read aloud in the chapel; her Jesuit directors had to moderate her austerities. She died at Kahnawake on Wednesday of Holy Week, April 17, 1680, aged twenty-four. Eyewitnesses, including Father Pierre Cholenec, reported that within fifteen minutes of her death the smallpox scars vanished from her face, leaving it radiant.

Pope Saint John Paul II beatified her at Saint Peter's on June 22, 1980, the first Native American to be beatified. Pope Benedict XVI canonized her at Saint Peter's on October 21, 2012, making her the first Native American saint of North America. Her shrine and relics are venerated at Saint Francis Xavier Mission, Kahnawake, Quebec, and at the National Shrine of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha in Fonda, New York.