Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

St. Kateri's mother was a Christian Algonquin, baptised at Trois-Rivières. The Iroquois took her prisoner and kept her in their country, where a Mohawk man married her. He was not a Christian.

In 1660 AD smallpox killed St. Kateri's father, mother and brother within a few days. Her mother died regretting only that her two children were not baptised. St. Kateri, aged four, survived with a pock-marked face and eyes that could not bear strong light.

St. Kateri was raised by her aunts and her uncle, chief of the Turtle clan. Her uncle was a declared enemy of the Christian faith and held fast to the customs of his people. St. Kateri ground the corn, fetched water and carried wood for the lodge.

After French troops burned Mohawk villages in 1666 AD, the Mohawks made peace and asked for missionaries. In September 1667 AD three Jesuits arrived, and her uncle received them. St. Kateri lodged and served them for three days, and their piety and courtesy impressed her.

Her aunts and uncle wanted her married to a hunter who would bring game to the lodge. They engaged her to a young man without telling her. One evening he came into the lodge and sat down beside her.

St. Kateri blushed, stood up and walked out, and would not come back while he stayed. Among her people it was a disgrace for a woman to stay unmarried. Her relatives then treated her as a slave and gave her the hardest work.

Some thirty or forty Christians left her village for a new mission near Montreal, and her uncle was enraged. St. Kateri went to the missionaries' instructions but never dared see a priest alone, partly from fear of her uncle. One day an injured foot kept her lying in the cabin while most of the women worked in the fields.

Passing through the village, Father Jacques de Lamberville, its missionary, felt a sudden urge to go into her cabin. She told him she had long wanted to become a Christian. He instructed her for months and baptised her on Easter Sunday 1676 AD and named her Kateri, a form of Catherine, after St. Catherine of Siena.

For more than a year after her baptism, her family made her life hard. They sometimes kept food from her because she would not work on Sundays. People threw pebbles at her on her way to the chapel.

Her adopted sister and the sister's husband, both Christians, had already moved to the mission of Saint-François-Xavier, across the St. Lawrence from Montreal. Father de Lamberville urged her to go there too, and in the autumn of 1677 AD she escaped from her village with the help of three converts. She reached the mission at the end of that autumn, aged twenty-one, carrying a letter from Father de Lamberville to its Jesuits.

Father Pierre Cholenec, a Jesuit at the mission, admitted her to first Communion at Christmas 1677 AD. She came to the chapel at four in the morning and heard Mass at dawn and again at sunset. Later she stopped going into the woods with her people each winter to hunt, and spent the winter at the mission village instead.

Her relatives, and Anastasia Tegonhatsihongo, her late mother's friend, kept pressing her to marry. She hoped instead to found a convent on Heron Island with her friend Marie-Thérèse Tegaiaguenta, but the plan was never carried out. On March 25, 1679 AD she took a vow of perpetual virginity.

Her last illness came in Lent 1680 AD, and she lay in Anastasia's cabin. On Tuesday of Holy Week Father Cholenec carried the Host from the church to her cabin to give her Viaticum, the Communion of the dying. She received Extreme Unction on Wednesday, April 17.

She lived until three in the afternoon, waiting for the women who had gone into the woods to cut wood to come back. She died with them present, speaking the names of Jesus and Mary. About a quarter of an hour later, Father Cholenec saw her scarred face become beautiful.

From 1681 AD, cures were reported at the mission through her intercession. In 1684 AD her body was moved into the mission church, where people often came to visit it. On January 3, 1943 AD the Church issued the decree on her virtues and named her Venerable.

Pope John Paul II beatified her in St. Peter's on June 22, 1980 AD. In his homily Pope John Paul II said her vow of perpetual virginity was, as far as was known, the first among the North American Indians. Pope Benedict XVI canonized her in Saint Peter's Square on October 21, 2012 AD.