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The saints

St. Kateri Tekakwitha

A Mohawk orphan with a scarred face who walked two hundred miles to live her faith in freedom.

Feast: 14 July (feast on the U.S. calendar) · 1656 to 1680 · Reformation and missions · Ossernenon (New York) and Kahnawake (Quebec)

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Painting of St. Kateri Tekakwitha in a dark shawl, holding a cross, beside a river.

Father Claude Chauchetière, S.J., 1696. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / St. Kateri Tekakwitha

The Mohawk River valley, 1660s

Smallpox took Kateri’s parents and little brother when she was four, and left her face scarred and her eyes weak.1

She was raised by relatives in a Mohawk village in what is now New York.1

At twenty she asked to be baptized, and her own people turned on her for it.

Patron of Indigenous Americans1

01St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Lily of the Mohawks

She was mocked, threatened and refused food on Sundays because she would not work.1

She escaped and walked some two hundred miles to a Christian village near Montreal.1

02St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Kahnawake

There she taught children, cared for the sick and old, and spent long hours in prayer.1

She died in 1680 at twenty-four, and witnesses said her scars faded at her death.1

In 2012 she became the first Native American saint.1

Live it this week

Pray where you work

Kateri made little crosses in the woods and prayed while she worked. Pick one place you are every day this week (the car, the kitchen sink, the desk) and make it a spot where you always pray one short prayer.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Kateri Tekakwitha”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.