Monday, 7/14/14
Today the Church honors Kateri Tekakwitha, our first Native
American saint. I don’t agree with some of Kateri’s attitudes, but it takes all
kinds to make a heaven, and maybe I am wrong about it.
The outline of Kateri’s life saw her born in 1656 as the child
of a Mohawk chief and a captured Algonquin mother. Most of our Catholic stories
from those decades come from the French Jesuits who settled with the Huron
nation, the enemies of the Mohawks, who were part of the Iroquois nation that
traded with the English and the Dutch.
Kateri was four in 1660 when the European-brought Smallpox
took off her parents and sisters, leaving her scarred for life. Afterwards she
always wore a towel around her head to hide her disfigurement.
She was seventeen when her Mohawk people made peace with the
Jesuits. That brought her and her young lady companions into reading about the
saints of the Egyptian desert.
Those were the ancients who outdid each other in performing
acts that punished the flesh to strengthen the soul. Kateri, baptized at age
nineteen on Easter of 1775, was formally given the name of Catherine, after
Catherine of Sienna. From then on she intensified her acts of penance,
punishing the body to strengthen the soul.
My views, for what they are worth, do not go along with
that. I like to point out that the
ancient Greek Plato taught that our souls were created before our bodies. It
had his followers eeing our bodies
as the prisons for our souls. That led those desert saints to afflicting their
bodies to make them free their souls,
From the Middle Ages on our Church has preferred the views
of Aristotle, who taught that bodies and souls are created together. That leads
us to see that holiness is achieved when we have healthy souls in healthy
bodies.
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