Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680)

Today marks the death of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. In the Iroquois culture, there is a tradition of a small band of ascetic virgins. Several maidens were secluded in order to garner the spiritual power of their virginity for the benefit of the community. These virginal sodalities, known as IIeouinnon, had fallen into decay by the seventeenth century when the French plied these virgins with alcohol for sex.

Kateri reaffirmed this ancient tradition as she imitated Christian ascetics, thereby revitalizing Iroquois culture. She was the daughter of an Iroquois father and an Algonkian mother. They both died of the smallpox, a disease brought by Europeans, when she was four. She herself was disfigured by the disease, pockmarked, partly cripples and partially blind. Her name Tekakwitha is usually translated as “she who pushes with her hands” or “who walks groping for her way.” She lived with her uncle.

In 1675, at age 19, she was baptized by Jesuit missionaries. She took the Christian name Kateri (Catherine) She lived with the uncle’s family, and they didn’t approve of her conversion. So she went to live in the Jesuit mission nearby. There she looked after the elderly, the sick and the poor. In 1677, she took Communion, a rare thing then. Most converts had to go through a few more years of religious instruction before this could happen, but her case proves that the missionaries saw something exceptional in her.

Kateri lived an ascetic lifestyle, replete with hair shirts, fasting, and walking barefoot in the winter. She took a vow of sexual abstinence, and in time she gathered a group of like minded women about her. They called themselves the “Slavery of the Blessed Virgin.” In 1680, weakened by illness, she died at age 24. She soon became a “central icon” for the Jesuit missions in North America. A Jesuit wrote her biography soon after her deathm and her cult began. Her canonization cause was formally presented to Rome in 1932, and in 1980 she was beatified. Pope John Paul II said that she embodied the inculturation of the Gospel in Native American life. She was also an example of religious syncretism, fully Iroquois and fully Catholic.