The Osage women’s Catholic organization, Klah-Kah-She Club, will host an Osage meal for newly ordained Tulsa Bishop David Konderla in honor of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha’s Feast Day today.
A Eucharistic Procession will follow mass to the Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine at the Immaculate Conception Church in Pawhuska. An Osage meal will follow in the Parish Hall.
Bishop Konderla, who was ordained on June 30, will deliver the mass, which begins at 6:15 p.m. Father Sean Donovan of the church welcomed all Osages and other Native Americans in the area to wear their Native American dress in honor of St. Kateri.
St. Kateri, a 17th century Mohawk woman, is the first Native American saint canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.
St. Kateri was born in 1656 in New York. Her father was Mohawk and her mother Algonquin. According to the Catholic Transcript Online, St. Kateri’s parents and brother died in a smallpox outbreak when she was four years old. She survived, scarred and nearly blinded, and went to live with her father’s brother, the new chief of the Mohawk.
The clan moved across what is now called the Mohawk River after their village was raided in 1666 by a Canadian regiment. She escaped and converted to Catholicism with the help of Jesuit missionaries. She was baptized at age 20.
Persecuted for her new faith, in 1677 Kateri joined a Christian community in Canada, where she cared for the sick and the aged. She took a vow of chastity in 1679. When Kateri died in 1680 just before she turned 24, witnesses claimed that her smallpox scars vanished, revealing her beauty, and those she had been praying for were miraculously healed. Witnesses also claimed that for hundreds of years miracles have been attributed in her name for curing the sick.
A film has been made about her life, the 2015 EWTN film, “Kateri.”
To learn more about Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, visit: http://www.katerishrine.com/kateri.html
By
Osage News
Original Publish Date: 2016-07-14 00:00:00
