“She’s a heroine for us, she’s a role model for us,” said Fr. Henry Sands, pastor of St. Alfred Parish in Taylor, about the canonization of the first Native American saint.
Fr. Sands — whose own tribal heritage is Three Fires, the overall name adopted by the closely related Ojibway, Ottawa and Pottawatomi — took part in a pilgrimage to Italy to be present when Pope Benedict XVI officially declared the Church’s recognition of the sainthood of the woman who became known as the “Lily of the Mohawks.”
In the days following the Vatican ceremony, he and the other pilgrims also visited Assisi and other places.
In an Oct. 17 interview just a day before leaving, Fr. Sands also gave some guidance for pronouncing St. Kateri’s name. The accepting spelling, as devised by the French priests who knew her, does not really capture the pronunciation even for Francophone speakers, and is way, way off for English speakers.
It should be pronounced Gah-deh-lee Deh-gah-quee-tah, he said.
St. Kateri was born in 1656 in what is now Ossermempm, N.Y., to a Mohawk father and an Algonquin mother. She was baptized April 18, 1676, at St. St. Peter’s Mission in what is now Caughnawaga, N.Y.
She made her first Holy Communion on Christmas Day in 1677 at St. Francis Mission in La Pairie, Quebec, and died Wednesday of Holy Week, April 17, 1680, in Kanawake, Quebec, not far from Montreal.
She lived a life that saw much sorrow, losing her parents and brother to smallpox when she was just 4, and carrying disfiguring scars from her own bout with smallpox the rest of her life, Fr. Sands said.
Then why, on prayer cards, etc., is she is always portrayed as a beautiful Indian maiden? That’s part of her story; witnesses reported that after her death, there was an amazing transformation, so that all traces of her disfigurement disappeared.
In life, however, she was shunned not only for her appearance, but also for her Christian faith — a faith she not only held, but was always trying to share with others, Fr. Sands said.
“She made the decision to dedicate herself to Jesus Christ and to a radical living of the Christian life, despite all difficulties,” he remarked.
And that commitment helps explain why so many non-Indian people have also become devoted to St. Kateri, Fr. Sands suggested, noting that conferences about her life have even drawn people from other continents.
Darquise Izak, a member of St. Mark Parish, Warren, said she had been hoping and praying for St. Kateri’s canonization.
“Native people, and a lot of other people, have revered Kateri for many years — people from all over the world, actually,” said Izak, who is of Algonquin heritage.
It was an 11-year-old Washington state boy’s healing from flesh-eating bacteria, attributed to St. Kateri’s intercession, that the Vatican accepted as the miracle needed for her canonization.
Izak believes her own granddaughter’s survival as a baby was also a miracle brought about through St. Kateri’s intercession. She had begun praying after her daughter had been told the embryo was not in the womb and would not develop. But on her daughter’s next visit, she was told the unborn baby was in her womb and growing normally.
“I called her Kateri’s little baby, and now she is a very gifted and talented 20-year-old,” Izak said.
Julienne Montour, a St. Alfred parishioner, said she first learned of St. Kateri from holy cards she saw as a girl growing up in the former Epiphany Parish in Detroit.
But Montour, who like St. Kateri’s father is from the Mohawk tribe, said her devotion was especially kindled once she got to know the late Chet Adams, a prominent American Indian (as he preferred to be called) Catholic in his time, in the early 1990s.
Montour was so taken by St. Kateri’s story that Adams urged her to begin portraying her before parish groups and other gatherings to spread awareness and devotion to her.
Montour did, but it was more than just putting on a Native American costume to do her portrayals. She fasted and prayed for several days beforehand each time she did it.
“When you deny yourself physically, that frees your spiritual side to become more focused. Because of that, I could understand how it felt to be in her shoes, understand what it was like to go through what she did,” Montour said.
She said the experience had a profound effect on her, but she gave up the performances in the late 1990s, she said, because of her age. St. Kateri died at 24, and she believes anyone who portrays her should not be obviously older than that.
Montour said she is happy St. Kateri has been canonized, “even if it has taken 300 years.”
