Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha: July 14, 2008

Kateri Tekakwitha

1656 - 1680

1. At the age of twenty, Kateri, despite partial blindness and other physical deformities that came with small pox, was baptized a Roman Catholic. Her mother was an Algonquin Catholic Indian who died when Kateri was a child in the small pox plague.
2. Keteri's family refused to accept her Catholicism and relationship to Jesus. As the Bishop of Ogdensburg, NY wrote, "... Kateri became the village outcast." On Sundays, because she would not work, she was not given any food. In the village even the children would tease her. She was told that she would be tortured if she did not abandon her faith.
3. At the age of twenty, she fled her relatives and spent two tortuous months traveling through difficult terrain to get to the Jesuit mission at Sault Saint-Louis, located outside Montreal. There she did much to help others, teaching and praying. She was a strong devotee of Eucharistic Adoration.
4. Her health, never good, deteriorated rather quickly at the mission. She died on April 17, 1680 at the age of 24. Supposedly her last spoken words were "Jesus, I love you."

In the gospel reading for this celebration we read words that so fit the life of this young woman who gave so much of herself because of her conviction that Jesus was her Lord: "whoever loses his (her) life for my sake will find it." While not martyred, Kateri suffered greatly in giving her life to the missionary work of her faith.

Truly she has to be considered one of the early North American apostles. She lived the gospel as she had been taught it. Her life is a marvelous model for young people today who are often caught up with men and women of courage and daring.

While we live in very different times and circumstances, the Church gifts us with the lives of many saints and heroic women and men. Kateri was the first Native American to be Beatified.

No doubt she would be a very happy young woman today to see that concern that has recently developed for the environment. The Catholic Church has designated this young woman as the patroness of ecology and the environment.