Today, the Church in the United States celebrates the memorial of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks! Tekakwitha was born around the year 1656 in northeastern New York to a Mohawk father and Algonquin mother. After she lost her parents to smallpox, other family took her in. She was introduced to the Catholic faith by Jesuit missionaries when she was 11 years old and soon began living according to the Jesuits’ teachings, to the disapproval of her family and tribe. She resisted her family’s pleas to marry, preferring to give herself to Jesus alone. Tekakwitha was baptized at the age of 19, taking the name Kateri (the Mohawk form of Catherine, after St. Catherine of Siena). Facing growing hostility for her conversion, she moved to a community of Native Americans who had converted to Catholicism. There she prayed and offered sacrifices and penances for her family’s conversion. She died at the age of 24. Within a few minutes of her death, the scars that marked her face from her childhood sickness with smallpox disappeared. She was canonized in 2012 and is the patron saint of the environment and ecology.
St. Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us!
