St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Born in 1656 near present-day Auriesville, New York, to an Algonquin mother and a Mohawk chief, Kateri survived a smallpox epidemic at age four that killed her parents and left her nearly blind and scarred. Raised by an uncle who opposed Christianity, she was baptized at twenty by a Jesuit missionary and took the name Kateri — Catherine — after Catherine of Siena.

Her conversion brought fierce opposition from her village. She refused to work on Sundays, rejected marriage, and suffered ridicule and threats. She eventually fled two hundred miles on foot to the Christian mission at Kahnawake near Montreal, where she lived the last three years of her life in prayer, penance, and service to the sick and elderly.

She died at twenty-four on April 17, 1680. Witnesses said that within minutes of her death, the smallpox scars vanished from her face. Canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, she is the first Native American saint — a witness that holiness takes root in every culture and that the Gospel does not erase but transfigures the soil in which it is planted.