Patron of
Native peoples of North America · ecology and the environment · people in exile · orphans · those ridiculed for their faith
Biography
Birth and Early Life
Kateri Tekakwitha was born around 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, near present-day Auriesville, New York — the same village where the Jesuit missionaries Isaac Jogues and René Goupil had been martyred barely a decade earlier. Her father was a Mohawk chief; her mother was an Algonquin woman who had been baptized Christian before being taken captive by the Mohawks.
When Kateri was around four years old, a smallpox epidemic swept through the village. Both of her parents died. Kateri survived, but the disease left her face scarred and her eyesight severely damaged. The Mohawk word Tekakwitha — which became her name — means "she who bumps into things," a reference to the poor vision that would mark her entire life.
She went to live with her uncle, who was deeply hostile to Christianity and to the Jesuit missionaries beginning to make inroads among the Iroquois. Kateri grew up in this household, modest and quiet by all accounts, neither fully integrated into Mohawk social life nor connected to the Christian faith her mother had held.
Encounter with the Faith
In 1675, a Jesuit missionary named Father Jacques de Lamberville arrived in the village. Kateri — nearly twenty and having resisted enormous social pressure to marry — sought him out and asked for instruction in the faith. She told him she had wanted this since childhood.
Father de Lamberville was immediately struck by her. He wrote that she seemed to have received the faith not by instruction alone but by a kind of interior illumination. On Easter Sunday, April 18, 1676, Kateri Tekakwitha was baptized. She took the name Catherine — Kateri in Mohawk — after St. Catherine of Siena.
Persecution and Exile
Baptism made her life in the village nearly impossible. She was mocked for refusing to work on Sundays. Children threw stones at her. Her uncle grew hostile. In the fall of 1677, Father de Lamberville arranged for her to travel to the Christian Mohawk settlement of Kahnawake, near Montreal — a long and dangerous escape by night across wild country.
At Kahnawake, she found what she had been longing for: a community where she could live her faith openly. She attended Mass daily before dawn, walking through snow without shoes. She prayed long into the night. She fasted and cared for the sick and elderly with quiet tenderness.
A Short Life of Intense Holiness
On the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1679, Kateri made a vow of perpetual virginity — an almost unheard-of act for a young Mohawk woman. Her health declined steadily. She died on Wednesday of Holy Week, April 17, 1680, at approximately twenty-four years of age.
Those present testified that within minutes of her death, the smallpox scars that had marked her face since childhood disappeared completely. Her face, witnesses said, became luminous and beautiful.
"Jesos konoronkwa" — Jesus, I love you.
Legacy & Significance
Kateri Tekakwitha's canonization in 2012 was the first canonization of a Native North American in the history of the Church. She showed that the deepest holiness was possible in circumstances of total deprivation — orphaned, physically disabled, socially marginalized, without community or family support.
She did not abandon her identity as a Mohawk woman to become Catholic. She brought her whole self — her culture, her suffering, her deep capacity for contemplation — to the faith. That is what the Church recognized when it canonized her.
Patronages
- Native peoples of North America
- The first of their communities formally recognized as a saint by the universal Church.
- Ecology and the environment
- Reflects her deep connection to the natural world and the Mohawk understanding of creation as sacred.
- People in exile
- She was driven from her home village because of her faith, and prays for all who are displaced.
- Orphans
- Both her parents died when she was four.
- Those ridiculed for their faith
- She was mocked, stoned, and slandered for choosing baptism. A patron for anyone who has suffered social cost for their Catholic faith.
Feast Day · July 14
- Attend Mass
- Begin a novena on July 5, completing it on her feast day
- Read from the Jesuit Relations — eyewitness accounts of her life at Kahnawake
- Visit the Kateri Shrine in Fonda, NY
Prayer to St. Kateri Tekakwitha
O God, who among the many marvels of Your Grace in the New World, did cause to blossom on the banks of the Mohawk and St. Lawrence Rivers the pure and tender Lily, Kateri Tekakwitha, grant us the favor we beg through her intercession; that this Young Lover of Jesus and of His Cross may soon be counted among the Saints of Holy Mother Church, and that our hearts may be enkindled with a stronger desire to imitate her innocence and faith.
Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.
St. Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us.
Visit the Shrine
The shrine sits on the actual ground of the Mohawk village of Caughnawaga, where Kateri was born, grew up, and was baptized. The annual July 14 pilgrimage gathering draws thousands of Native American Catholics from across North America.
National Shrine of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha — Fonda, NY →Relics
Kateri's remains rest at Kahnawake Mission, Quebec. Partial relics are enshrined at Fonda, NY and at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.
Quotes
"I am not my own; I have given myself to Jesus."
"Who will teach me what is most pleasing to God, that I may do it?"
"It is enough that God knows of it."