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She and her family contracted smallpox when she was about four and her parents and brother died from the diseased.

According to The Catholic Encyclopedia and other reputable sources, Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in the Mohawk Valley that is now Auriesville, N.Y. Her mother was an Algonquin Indian who was a Christian and her father belonged to the Iroquois-Mohawk tribe.

I included information about St. Kateri’s life in a previous story that ran on Saturday, July 13. In this blog posting, I have expounded on that information to include other interesting aspects of her life:

A reader sent me an email today wanting more information about St. Kateri Tekakwitha, whose feast day was celebrated on Sunday with a Mass and an intertribal powwow at St. Gregory’s Abbey in Shawnee. I have a story in today’s paper about the event.

The orphaned Tekakwitha was adopted by relatives after her parents’ deaths. Church historians said the girl’s face was disfigured by her bout with smallpox and her eyesight also was seriously impaired.

One website, kateritekakwitha.net, says that because of the orphaned girl’s near blindness, she held her hands in front of her to feel her way along and protect herself from injury. It was from this characteristic she was renamed Tekakwitha or “She moves things” or “She who bumps into things.”

She met Jesuit missionaries when she was around 11. They helped her to find comfort and understanding of her life situation in Christianity. According to many historians, her uncle under whose care she was placed had an aversion to Christianity and some have said he felt this way because of the way American Indians were treated by white men at that time. Because of his aversion to the faith, church historians believe that much of Kateri’s early education of Christianity was learned in secret from her family.

Some historians have written that her uncle relented eventually and allowed her to be baptized as a Christian. He is said to have given his blessing on the condition that she would not try to leave the village. The Rev. James de Lamberville, a French priest, baptized her as Catherine Tekakwitha when she was somewhere between age 18 and 20. Kateri is the Mohawk pronunciation of Catherine.