On the fourteenth of July, the Church in the United States keeps the memorial of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the young Mohawk woman the faithful came to call the Lily of the Mohawks. She lived only twenty-four years, never wrote a book, never founded an order, and never left the river valleys of her own country. And in 2012 she became the first member of the Indigenous peoples of what is now the United States and Canada to be canonized a saint.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.Canticle of Canticles 2:2, Douay-Rheims
A hard beginning
She was born in 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, in what is now upstate New York, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and a Christian Algonquin mother. When she was about four, smallpox swept through the village. It took her father, her mother, and her baby brother, and it left the little girl who survived with a scarred face and eyes so weakened that bright light pained her for the rest of her life. Her Mohawk name, Tekakwitha, is often taken to mean “she who bumps into things,” a nod to the dim sight the disease left behind. She was raised by her uncle, and she grew up quiet, skilled with her hands, and given to solitude.
When Jesuit missionaries came to her village, something in their message found ground already prepared in her, perhaps the seed her mother had planted. At about twenty she asked for baptism, and on Easter of 1676 she was christened Catherine, Kateri in her own tongue, after St. Catherine of Siena. The cost was immediate. In her village her new faith was met with ridicule and worse; she was mocked for keeping Sunday, pressured to marry, and treated as a stranger among her own people. A lily among thorns indeed.
The long walk north
In 1677 she slipped away and walked some two hundred miles north to Kahnawake, a village of Christian Mohawks on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. There, at last, she could live her faith in the open, and she did so with a wholeheartedness that astonished the missionaries who knew her. She rose early for Mass in the cold, prayed before the Blessed Sacrament for hours, and on the feast of the Annunciation in 1679 made a private vow of virginity, giving herself entirely to Christ. Those who saw her remembered her walking the woods with a rosary in her hand, stopping to carve small crosses into the trees, so that the forest itself became a chapel hung with the one image she loved best.
Her health, frail since childhood, gave way in her early twenties. She died at Kahnawake on the seventeenth of April, 1680, during Holy Week. Her last words are remembered as “Jesus, I love you.” And then the mission fathers at her bedside recorded something they could scarcely believe: within minutes of her death, the smallpox scars she had carried for twenty years faded away, and her face grew serene and beautiful. Their written testimony survives to this day.
The slow crowning
Devotion to Kateri began at her grave and never stopped. Pilgrims came, favors were reported, and her story was carried down through three centuries of Native Catholic families who kept her memory as their own. St. John Paul II beatified her in 1980. Then, after the sudden healing of a young boy in Washington State was recognized as a miracle through her intercession, Pope Benedict XVI canonized her on the twenty-first of October, 2012. The Church now invokes her as a patroness of ecology and of Indigenous peoples, the saint of a creation she treated, all her life, as a place to meet God.
Her whole prayer life fit in her two hands: a rosary, a carved cross, the woods, the Mass. She is proof, if we needed it, that sanctity requires no library and no cathedral. It asks for what she had: attention, constancy, and a love willing to walk two hundred miles.
Keeping her day
You need not do anything grand to honor her when her day comes round. Take your prayer outside, as she did, and pray a single decade slowly under the open sky, offering it for anyone who bears the cost of following Christ. Or simply pause and ask her help:
St. Kateri, Lily of the Mohawks, who loved Jesus in the woods and the cold and the long walk north, teach us to pray with what is in our hands, to stand gently when faith costs us something, and to find God in everything He has made. Amen.
She carried her whole devotion on a string of beads and a carved cross. If you find yourself wanting beads of your own to carry, our handmade rosaries are made for exactly that.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was St. Kateri Tekakwitha?
A Mohawk woman born in 1656 near present-day Auriesville, New York. Orphaned and scarred by smallpox as a child, she was baptized at about twenty, lived a life of deep prayer at the Christian village of Kahnawake, and died in 1680 at the age of twenty-four. She was canonized in 2012, the first Indigenous saint of the United States and Canada.
When is the feast of St. Kateri Tekakwitha?
July 14 on the calendar of the United States, kept as a memorial. In Canada her feast is kept on April 17, the day of her death.
Why is she called the Lily of the Mohawks?
The lily is the ancient emblem of purity, and Kateri, who made a vow of virginity in 1679 and lived her faith amid opposition, was honored with the title by the faithful who kept her memory. It echoes the Scripture, “As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters” (Canticle of Canticles 2:2).
What is St. Kateri the patron saint of?
She is invoked as a patroness of ecology and the environment, of Indigenous peoples, and of those who suffer ridicule or exile for their faith.
