Catholic saints are a weird lot. Through no obvious power of their own they do great things.
Across the years of time and the divides of culture and language saints entice us, mystify us, intrigue us, maybe even irritate us. Strange stories and legends build up around them – stories of taming wolves, bodily incorruptibility, ecstatic union with the Divine Spouse – and stories of downright unbelievable feats of love and generosity.
I recently attended a Mass of Thanksgiving for the canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha. Hundreds of people poured into the magnificent Oratory of St. Joseph on the slopes of Montreal's Mount Royal to give thanks for this young Mohawk woman whom the Church declared a saint on October 21, 2012.
Born in 1656 to a Christian Algonquin woman and a Mohawk chief in what is now upstate New York (in the town of Auriesville), she eventually met Jesuit missionaries. These blackrobes impressed Kateri by their courteous manners and their piety. A smallpox outbreak took her parents and brother when she was just four and left Kateri with weak eyes and potmarked face. 
On Easter Sunday 1676, at 20 years of age she was baptized. Persecution by her family eventually forced her to move to the Jesuit mission at Kahnawake across from Montreal where she eventually died at the young age of 24.
Saint Kateri is North America's first aboriginal saint. Impressive as that is, the Church goes even further and states that Saint Kateri is now a model for the universal Church. She goes beyond the regional, the national, the continental and the ethnic or cultural, bridging all peoples for all times.
It seems that canonizations in the Church do not often happen without a context. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission crosses Canada to engage the legacy of the Indian Resi
dential Schools, Saint Kateri emerges on the scene. I wonder what healing we will witness in her name.
Saints unsettle us. They bridge our well-guarded chasms, misunderstandings and our ruptures. Their very existence questions our deeply held fears and blindness. Maybe that's the greatest miracle.
In some small way, I witnessed that miracle at the Mass of Thanksgiving celebrated in French, English and Mohawk on the slopes of Mount Royal. I thought to myself. Who would have predicted several hundred years ago, that a young, sickly Mohawk woman
would one day gather together in prayer long-standing, traditional enemies.
She bridged the aboriginal and European cultures, the Mohawk and Algonquin cultures, the world of belief and unbelief, the world of linguistic and cultural tensions.
Because of Kateri's weak eyes from childhood smallpox, she was extremely sensitive to the brightness of daylight. She was thus given the name Tekakwitha – she who feels her way ahead. What a most apt description of the life of faith.
After the celebration, I descended the slopes of Mount Royal filled with a deep sense of hope. As we filed past each other, each intent on his or her own world, busy with this or that, I thought that, if only for a moment, we were one. We had left behind our differences in the name of the Lily of the Mohawks. That is miracle enough for me. Saint Kateri, pray for us.