It’s been 12 years since St. Kateri Tekakwitha was declared a saint by the Catholic church, in October 2012. She was a Mohawk/Algonquin woman who lived in the late 17th century in present-day New York and Quebec, declaring herself a virgin for Christ. Her sainthood has sparked both pride and soul-searching within and beyond Canada’s First Nations.
Beverly Anna Sky Delormier: "I thought it would never happened in my lifetime, but it did and there was a… there's a person I know who's had didn't always come and told her grandmother that she'll come back to church all the time if Kateri gets canonized and she did, so now she's back in church!"
Fr. Richard Saint-Louis: "All that time we we recognize that the church is built with men and women who are sinners and (thank God) we are sinners so it's a challenge for us to be able to recognize that first of all, and recognize also the mercy of God for all sinners and knowing that we are able to spread the Gospel around by the way we live, by the way we act."
St. Kateri’s earthly remains are entombed in St. Francis Xavier Mission Catholic Church in Kahnawake on the banks of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. The church is not far from the Kateri school and Kateri Memorial Hospital, visible reminders that she lived here, or nearby, in a Catholic community before her death, at age 24.
In this episode we are not retelling St. Kateri’s life story, but rather we’re bringing you voices from a few members of the present day Catholic community in Kahnawake. We will hear about what her sainthood means to them.
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Difficult history for the Catholic Church
But before we can do that, we need to be transparent: there are many serious issues that may cloud discussions involving the Catholic Church that we won’t fully be able to explore.
The Church has a complicated history and present here.
Jesuits, known as the Black Robes, evangelized as European powers colonized North America. Over centuries, the systems put in place to govern these territories have wrested ancestral lands, water rights, and more, from the indigenous peoples. Church-affiliated residential schools separated children from their families and culture in the name of assimilation. Despite public apologies from Pope Francis, the reports of abuses committed at those schools have left societal wounds that, for some, may never fully heal.
But for some Catholics, faith bears witness to their resilience.
Fr. Richard Saint-Louis: “This was a Jesuit Mission and I’ve been raised by the Jesuits, and I was part of the order for a time so to me, it’s really dear to my heart and to be able to serve this community which is quite extraordinary, this community is um is going through a lot of hardship, a lot of hardship, but when you meet people you know they’re… always smiling–it is I would say a resilient community.”
Kateri’s canonization
Pope Benedict XVI: “Kateri Tekakwitha was born into this New York State in 1656 to a Mohawk father, and a Christian Algonquin mother…”
This is Pope Benedict XVI, in 2012, during a broadcast of the canonization mass of Kateri Tekakwitha. During his homily, the pope gave a summary of each of the newly recognized saints. Since St. Kateri’s final resting place is in modern-day Canada, the profile was in English and French, heard here through an interpreter.
Pope Benedict XVI, through an interpreter: “Kateri impresses us by the action of Grace in her life in spite of the absence of external help and by the courage of vocation…”
During the prayers of the faithful we also hear a prayer in the Mohawk language.
“Oh God source of all Holiness through the intercession of the Holy Martyrs grant fidelity and strength to those persecuted for the faith…”
The area around Montreal is a great example of Canada’s diversity, as all of these languages and more can be found in short order. Depending on traffic, St. Francis Xavier church in Kahnawake is about 30 or 40 minutes from Mount Royal (Mont real in French). You can see the imposing dome of another Catholic site, St. Joseph’s Oratory from the Kahnawake’s shoreline on the St. Lawrence.
The church in Kahnawake is relatively simple—beautiful—but humble, much as St. Kateri was said to be. A small group gathered for Mass here during a week in 2023 when I visited. Marian is a French-Canadian woman who volunteers here. She discovered Kateri more than a decade ago.
Marian: “Since the canonization I think there are more pilgrims that come. There are a lot of curious people that come, too, and when they discover the tomb of Kateri there’s a grace. She shares her faith with people.”
The priest here is Father Richard Saint-Louis who says the canonization of St. Kateri contributed to a sense of unity in the community.
Fr. Richard Saint-Louis: “Well it it was for the entire community I would suggest a factor of of unity. As Kateri, as I like to say that Kateri gathers around her all the communities and personally for myself it it was a blessing to have finally that that saint recognized by the church and it’s the first one I think that is coming from from the Mohawk Nation so really a blessing for the Mohawk nation and I would suggest for the entire Catholic community.”
Discourse about Kateri the saint and person
The appeal to unity may not be accepted by all people. You can find essays and editorials over the years which question St. Kateri’s canonization as a kind of cultural appropriation, or not representing a typical Mohawk woman. After all, she rejected arranged marriage and a vocation of motherhood to take on a kind of consecrated virginity. By forging her own path, in her Catholic faith, some contemporaries saw Kateri as turning from her culture.
And while named a saint, meaning the church believes she’s in Heaven, no saint is a perfect person. Some of St. Kateri’s religious practices, including self-harm, went too far, and the clergy of her time said as much. Kateri practiced something known as self-mortification, where essentially someone voluntarily causes themselves physical harm as an act of penance and sacrifice. This can be extreme fasting, burning or injuring one’s self in various ways, or similar. It’s a show of devotion to reject pleasure and unite to Christ’s suffering, but ultimately can be very unhealthy if not monitored.
In addition, a certain tension in Mohawk culture around Mohawk traditions, Longhouse, Protestant, or Catholic religions, has—for some—complicated how to interpret St. Kateri’s legacy.
Beverly Anna Sky Delormier grew up in Kahnawake, living here all of her 80 years. She went to school across from the church, when the school used to be Catholic. She walked me through her experience of St. Kateri’s canonization and legacy, and even helped me pronounce St. Kateri’s name in the Mohawk language.
A conversation with Beverly Anna Sky Delormier
***Rough transcript follows***
Beverly: “It was um hard to wrap your brain around it that we actually have a saint here, our saint. You know we always talked about Kateri Tekakwitha as I was growing up, we all we we know her story. We used to come here and look at her bones. They used to be on display in a kind of like a glass case, and I remember some of them kind of longish some figuring the femur maybe and there was several, the case was a anyway… and then at one point it seems uh I had heard that somebody tried to steal them. So and then the Daughters of Isabella from this community they bought the tomb and had it entombed so no longer able to look at them. We’ve had requests for first class relics, but there there’s no more. I mean there’s there’s a first class relics probably there’s a one in Quebec City, I heard, we have hers entombed so we can’t take them out. We have one in a case that people can venerate when they come here. Other than that I don’t know where… I think there’s one in Rome, but people requested but we don’t have them. I mean we just don’t get that out anymore.”
Tony: And proper pronunciation of Kat-eer-ee?
Beverly: “Gah-dare-ee. In Mohawk that’s what we say Gah-dare-ee, Gah-dare-ee Day-gahd-wee-tuh….means um if you can’t see and you’re going from here to the other room you’re kind of feeling your way around that’s what that means like you’re kind of…in the booklet it says she puts things in order, and I guess you would do that if uh you’re you’re blind, practically blind you got to have things in order, but you have to feel your way around that that’s what that means.”
Tony: Okay…I’m going to practice.
Beverly: “Yeah well you know in there’s words we call them, we call them borrowed words okay because there’s no Mohawk word for it, so for instance Mary in Mohawk we say Wari (Wahr-dee). Now we don’t have the letter M in our language so we change the M to the W yeah and we don’t have the letter Y so we changed it to I so hence you get the word Wari and another one would be um uh well Catherine . We don’t have the TH sound but we do have T-H together so we don’t have the letter C change it to K, and the TH to T…Catherine and the rest is E-R-I. So it’s Guh-darr-ee. A K in Mohawk is a G sound okay, but if it’s with a H it’s a soft K. So guh or cuh and then the T is a D sound, but with a h is soft T. So there’s a few letters like that.”
Tony: So before the canonization um do you think that her life and message was very well known beyond her community..
Beverly: “Yeah, yes.”
Tony: Was it kind of underground or do you think it was just very…
Beverly: “No, it was it was just not on, I I remember from the school from Kateri school we used to come here like say one class would come one month, and the next month another class would come and we would put all those Kateri magazines, or booklets you would call them, in envelopes and those envelopes went out all over the world: Germany, the Philippines it was amazing all those. And so they had us students from the school putting them in envelopes, closing them, and then they would go out, so it was all over the world. Now I don’t know how many people even… I know it doesn’t go out every month anymore, I think it’s quarterly. But there’s a man who works at the Kateri Center, they do that now. It’s not the people here in the church.”
Tony: The father was saying that this used to be a refuge for Christians and that’s how Kateri came here…
Beverly: “But not on this site…so she came up from near Albany New York, Fonda actually, it’s called Auriesville. She made her way here because this is where the Mohawks were practicing the religion. It’s near La Prairie which isn’t too far from here okay about 12 kilometers maybe, anyway, that’s where she was and then when they moved four times, the fourth time is here but she had already passed away.”
Tony: Wow, yeah so does it feel in some ways that this is still a refuge? We always hear..
Beverly: “No it doesn’t. It feels like a refuge as a Mohawk community because it’s a reserve, so we live on the reservation and we try to keep it just because it’s all…what little we have they’re still trying to take it away. You know this went through took all the beach front properties away; Highway over on the other side of the right through the middle of the community; you know the bridge… so it’s always, we’re always fighting to keep what little we have. So as I guess you would say as a community it’s kind of like a refuge for our little community you know but not as a Catholic community because many people have now left the church for uh to practice um well I I can’t say that um the traditional is a religion but there is um um I’m trying to find a word you know like the the Golden Rule, but we have that we call it <…> means it’s nice you put that suffix at the end means um um bigger so <…> is nice it’s nice every the whole everything is nice yeah so <…> if you practice that then everything is nice so which is the Golden Rule. You you treat other people like you want to be treated, you’re kind to people and supposedly that’s how we practice but not everybody does that, well even uh religious people don’t do that.”
Tony: That’s true
Beverly: “If everybody did that you know it would be…”
Tony: God’s Kingdom on Earth. All the pilgrims coming here I feel like that could be a good thing for the community, but also a challenge maybe at times.
Beverly: “Yeah we do get a lot of pilgrims, we also get tourists there’s kind of a difference between a tourist and a pilgrim.
Tony: Level of respect
Beverly: “Yeah and it is a good thing. Once a year they have a big pow wow on the island, we have island the men built an island from this seaway that went through, so there we have people coming from all you know the surrounding areas and out-of-towners and like from not just Quebec you know, so that that’s one big thing. And so they’re all over come to the church on that weekend, it’s always the second weekend in July on that weekend we have a special Mass for iron workers because the the men in this town were noted for their high steel work. They built, they like to say they built New York and they they pretty much did . They had a really good reputation regarding iron work. Yeah my father was an iron worker, my grandfather, my husband, all his brothers all my uncles, my brothers, you know so we have a special Mass for those guys.”
Tony: That’s great. For people who don’t know anything about this community, especially the faith community, what would you say they should really know? I mean just talking to to the few people I have it seems like the faith is alive here–we shouldn’t write it off.
Beverly: “No, no, no I mean there’s less and less people in the church but a lot of people you know they are Catholic, they’ll say I I’m Catholic and nothing’s going to change me you know but we don’t see them here, you know. And that’s fine, they practice their their faith in their own way, I practice my faith by coming to church. I like to come here, I want to keep the church going. That’s my…I made a commitment I’ll do it till the day I die you know.”
Tony: Many years in the future…
Beverly: “Well I hope so, I hope so, I mean I’m going to be 80 years old this year.”
Tony: 80 years young, Beverly.
Beverly: “It gets harder and harder it gets harder and harder to keep that commitment. But I know it, at one time and not too long ago you’d have on Christmas Eve or Easter you have to get here here early so you can sit at the back now you got a lot of space.”
Tony: That is that is so Catholic. Last question: anything else you think people should know about St. Kateri and her message?
Beverly: “Well Kateri Tekakwitha was very humble and I remember discussing this at one time, they wanted to change her feast day cuz we celebrate here in Kahnawaka on April 17th, that’s the date of her death, so uh they wanted to change it to July because in the States that’s when they celebrate it and we didn’t want to do it. And then one person had said well she said she would want it like this, and I said no she wouldn’t she wouldn’t want it like that, because she was very humble, she wouldn’t want to have this big celebration you know. Like we do all the time so it’s…she was a very humble person um very dedicated to the cross, that was her life. You know and she wanted to become a nun but she we’re we’re thinking that she probably went to the had been to that church on in Old Montreal you know on St Paul Street yeah uh what’s the name of that church Marguerite Bourgeoys…yeah we think she probably because she wanted to become an nun so she must have met those those ladies gosh and she wanted to start her own…”
Tony: We went to Easter Mass at the chapel…Notre… Our Lady of Good Help, and one of my most popular episodes was going to the Apparition site in Wisconsin in Champion, Wisconsin and it’s um Our Lady of Good Help appeared, the local Bishop said, in Wisconsin so coming to Montreal we wanted to see this Chapel to Our Lady of Good Help, and now there’s a connection also to this site. This is amazing yeah wow.
Beverly: “I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that she was so holy and you know there was a point though that um she practiced mortification, and they had to stop her from doing it because she was her health wasn’t good for her yeah yeah and so did…we went to Fatima those those little children they did that too you know, the little boy and the little girl, they did that, so there’s something there you know there’s connections when you’re in in a certain state I guess in your belief that gets you there. I could never do that I mean, I I we we pray to her and ask her to help us to be as strong and you know as her to to be strong enough to get to Heaven. In in 2019 I was diagnosed with cancer in my stomach and on my left kidney and the first thing I did was, because I thought thought I was going to I thought I was going to fall on the floor when they told me, I was standing up when I told me I said I got to I got to sit down and and it was just like and then I start praying to her I said give me courage to face this. I didn’t ask her to heal me, I just said give me courage so I can face this. And the next morning I woke up and was like okay let’s do what we have to do…that was 2019 they took four-fifths of my stomach and my left kidney and I feel fine, it’s like as if nothing ever happened to me. How do you like, I I can’t even think that happened to me yeah you know yeah how do you go I thought my my my days were done that was it…
Tony: Praise God
Beverly: “How could, how do you live without a stomach? You know I remember the surgeon telling me he said if we could save a a small part it’s going to help you because that part will it stretches yeah and when I came out of the surgery he said we were able to save one-fifth of your stomach, I can’t believe it. My sister was telling me recently she said I remember when you came out in the hospital she said oh my gosh she said you look horrible like I had lost so much weight, I was like a skinny little stick, and now she said it’s like as if you never got sick. I said well that’s how I feel, I feel like I don’t feel sick, I feel like I never did. I was never in any pain never. They just found it because I was uh losing blood and uh yeah they made they took tests and that’s how they found it, so never any pain and that’s because Kateri helped me and I can’t believe how many people were praying for me in this church. Everybody that comes to church was praying for me: I was so impressed with that you know.”
Tony: That’s unity in this community, beautiful thank you so much Beverly.
Beverly: “You’re welcome.”
Final thoughts
My thanks to Beverly and everyone from the Catholic community in Kahnawake who welcomed me and my family to this special place.
I’m in no position to tell you or anyone how to feel about St. Kateri or the Catholic history and present in Canada and the First Nations. But I can tell you what I saw and heard: a small but faith-filled community of believers working hard to share the lessons and messages from St. Kateri’s life. No person, be it believer or non-believer, layperson or clergy, saint and sinner, none of us is perfect. It is through faith that we strive to do our best, praying for God’s grace to lift us when we fall. And all it takes is two or three gathered in Christ’s name for Him to be in their midst.
In the second letter to the Corinthians we read: “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.” Let us pray for and serve each other as Christ taught us, and He will give us strength to endure.