Saint Kateri: When Saints Bring Up Tough Questions

“Why did she die Mom? She wasn’t old.”

This is the question I got recently from my 5 year old about St. Kateri Tekawitha, the Lily of the Mohawks. And boy, is it a tough one to answer.

G fell absolutely in love with St. Kateri last year when thanks to Adalee Hude’s beautiful book, Light of Heaven. Since then she has returned over and over again to the story of the first Native American saint in the Catholic Church. I’m not sure what drew G to her; she has never been able to verbalize it, but with St. Therese, Kateri has become a dear friend to her.

She often listens to a book about Kateri that we found on Formed, and after her most recent listen, she asked me why Kateri had died so young.

The reality is that Saint Kateri died so young because she took part in excessive self-mortification. She fasted excessively and slept on thorns. She burned and whipped herself. All of this she did for the sake of repentence and the conversion of the other members of her tribe. It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t healthy physically, and I would argue that it wasn’t healthy psychologically or even spiritually.

Saint Kateri isn’t the only saint to perform such feats of self-mortification, and not the only one to perform them to excess, or to the point of death (St. Catherine of Siena springs to mind). Saints are people too, and despite their title, often made mistakes.

I was recently reading a fabulous book (Lies My Teacher Told Me, seriously, check it out), and the author wrote something that stuck out to me. Talking about the great historical figures of American history and why they are lionized with their various flaws glossed over, Loewen says, “we don’t want complex icons.” He was making the point that we want to be able to hold our heroes up as perfect and without flaw.

But is this true about our saints? I would argue no, but sometimes I think we can get into the same habits with saints that we do about historical figures- we struggle to acknowledge the sin, the mistakes, the gray areas of their lives, and so we run from them and only talk about the virtues.

Sure, we talk about their pre-conversion lives of sin (think Ignatius or Augustine), but what about afterwards? Do we allow ourselves space to come to terms with the fact that these people were not perfect after their conversions?

Personally, I think it’s a shame if we don’t. By ignoring the flaws of our saints, like Kateri’s excessive self-harm, we miss out on a facet of the message of God’s mercy.

For me, allowing my children to see that there are saints who made choices that weren’t always right (even after a conversion or reversion to the faith), helps them to understand that even the best of us can be confused about what God is asking of us. If even the saints got things wrong sometimes, it’s okay if they do too.

As my kids get older, we’ll have deeper discussions of the gray areas of the lives of the saints, but for now we keep the message simple. In the case of Saint Kateri, we remind them that God gave us our bodies and that we need to love and respect them. Saint Kateri thought that she had to prove to God that she was sorry by hurting her body, which is not what God wants from us, and because she didn’t take care of her body, she got sick and was too weak to get better again. We talk about what a tremendously sad thing that was, and how sad it must have made God too. We try to be be matter of fact about it.

And then we focus our attention back on the rest of Saint Kateri’s life. Because our mistakes never outweigh the work that God does in us when we let Him. That’s the message that I want my children to take away from their study of the saints.

There’s an exciting update about my Marian Consecration for Families with Young Children, so make sure you click on over to learn how you can pre-order your copy!