"During the course of the day she from time to time broke off from her work to go and hold communion with Jesus Christ at the foot of the altar. In the evening she returned again to the church, and did not leave it until the night was far advanced. When engaged in her prayers, she seemed entirely unconscious of what was passing about her; and in a short time the Holy Spirit raised her to so sublime a devotion that she often spent many hours in intimate communion with God.
"To this inclination for prayer she joined an almost unceasing application to labor.... She always ended the week by an exact investigation of her faults and imperfections, that she might efface them by the sacrament of penance, which she underwent every Saturday evening. For this she prepared herself by different mortifications with which she afflicted her body; and when she accused herself of faults, even the most light, it was with such vivid feelings of compunction that she shed tears, and her words were choked by sighs and sobbings. The lofty idea she had of the majesty of God made her regard the least offence with horror; and when any had escaped her, she seemed not able to pardon herself for its commission.
"Virtues so marked did not permit me for a very long time to refuse her the permission which she so earnestly desired, that on the approaching festival of Christmas she should receive her first communion. This is a privilege which is not accorded to those who come to reside among the Iroquois, until after some years of probation and many trials; but the piety of Katherine placed her beyond the ordinary rules. She participated, for the first time in her life, in the Holy Eucharist, with a degree of fervor proportioned to the reverence she had for this grace, and the earnestness with which she had desired to obtain it."
She made her communion on Christmas day. Her fervor did not slacken afterward. Whenever there was a general communion among the Indians at the Sault, the most virtuous neophytes endeavored with emulation to be near her, because, said they, the sight alone of Kateri served them as an excellent preparation for communing worthily. She was allowed to make her second communion at Easter time. Father Fremin, her former guest of the Mohawk Valley, soon admitted her, without the customary delay, into the Confraternity of the Holy Family. This honor was accorded only to well-tried and thoroughly instructed Christians. The meetings of the Confraternity filled up the hours of each Sunday afternoon, and the members of it were expected to reproduce in their own homes, as far as possible, the family life of the three who dwelt together in the Holy House at Nazareth,—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Saint Joseph was held up as a model for the men, the Blessed Virgin for the women, and the child Jesus for the children.
Kateri had no sorrows at this time save one, which was that her nearest kindred still rejected and scorned the faith that was dearer to her than life. The ties of blood are strong in a noble heart. Anastasia, her own good friend and instructress, was there at the Sault; the adopted sister was there, a relative in name if nothing more; the "great Mohawk" was there, and he was a host in himself. But after all, what a handful were these compared to the brave men and women of her tribe in the Mohawk Valley,—those who had shared in the defence of Caughnawaga Castle against the Mohegans, and who still dwelt in her native land, and were bound to her by so many ties! Her uncle, her kindred, her nation, were against her in her Christian faith; and the struggle that wrung her own heart foreshadowed a great struggle that was yet to come between the haughty nations of the Iroquois League and their exiled Christian tribesmen,—one that would make martyrs, glorious Iroquois martyrs. At Onondaga, the capital of the League, it was indeed proved, in course of time, that these children of the forest could give up their lives as nobly as the early Christians who were torn to pieces in the Amphitheatre at Rome.
With sympathetic insight, Kateri felt the gathering storm. She foresaw it more or less clearly from the first. And as if in anticipation of what was in store for the Christian Iroquois, her short life at the Sault became, as we shall see, a holocaust of prayer and self-torture. It must be remembered that in her day the laws of hygiene were not made prominent and taught to the young people as they are now; nor were the missionaries in authority over her aware at the time of all her practices, which their wise counsels might have better directed. So Kateri, unchecked, passed her life at the Sault in a ceaseless, tireless effort to lift her nature high above the lawless passions to which the people of her race were subject. For their sins and for her own she suffered and prayed. Five times a day she knelt in the mission chapel and pleaded with God for the infidel Indians, her friends and her kindred.
What wonder, then, that after her life on earth was ended, and her life with Christ began, the Christian Indians should continue even till now to think of her as interceding with God in their behalf!
FOOTNOTES:
[60] [See map], Les Cinq Stations du Village, etc. The circle enclosing a figure 2, and surmounted by a cross, marks the site here described.