From the AP: Jake Finkbonner was so
close to death after flesh-eating bacteria infected him through a cut
on his lip that his parents had last rites performed and were discussing
donating the 5-year-old's tiny organs.
Jake's
2006 cure from the infection was deemed medically inexplicable by the
Vatican, the "miracle" needed to propel a 17th century Native American,
Kateri Tekakwitha, on to sainthood. Kateri will be canonized on Sunday
along with six other people, the first Native American to receive the
honor.
Jake is fully convinced, as is the
church, that the prayers his family and community offered to Kateri,
including the placement of a relic of the soon-to-be saint on Jake's
leg, were responsible for his survival.
Jake,
now 12 and an avid basketball player and cross-country runner, will be
present at the canonization, along with hundreds of members of his own
Lummi tribe from northwest Washington state and reservations across the
U.S. and Canada who have converged on Rome to honor one of their own.
It's a ceremony the Catholic Church hopes will encourage Native
Americans to keep to their Christian faith amid continued resentment
among some that Catholicism was imposed on them by colonial-era
missionaries centuries ago.
"I believe
everybody has a purpose on this earth," Jake's mother Elsa Finkbonner
said this week soon after the family arrived in Rome for the ceremony.
"I think this Sunday Jake will define his purpose, and that's to make
Kateri a saint."...
Besides Kateri, Pope
Benedict XVI will declare another American a saint Sunday, Mother
Marianne Cope, a 19th century Franciscan nun from Utica, New York - near
where Kateri lived two centuries earlier - who cared for lepers exiled
to Hawaii's Kalaupapa Peninsula. Another new saint is Pedro Calungsod, a
Filipino teenager who was killed in 1672 along with his Jesuit
missionary priest by natives resisting their conversion efforts.
The
Catholic Church creates saints to hold up models for the faithful,
convinced that their lives - even lived hundreds of years ago - are
still relevant to today's Catholics. The complicated saint-making
procedure requires that the Vatican certify a "miracle" was performed
through the intercession of the candidate - a medically inexplicable
cure that can be directly linked to the prayers offered by the faithful.
One miracle is needed for beatification, a second for canonization.
In
Jake's case, Kateri was already an important figure for Catholics in
the Lummi tribe, of which his father Donny is a member. A carved wooden
statue sits in the church on the Lummi reservation near Bellingham,
Washington, 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of the Canadian border, where
Jake's grandparents worshipped and where Donny remembers being told of
Kateri's story as a child.
Known as the "Lily
of the Mohawks," Kateri was born in 1656 to a pagan Iroquois father and
an Algonquin Christian mother in what is today upstate New York. Her
parents and only brother died when she was 4 during a smallpox epidemic
that left her badly scarred and with impaired eyesight. She went to live
with her uncle, a Mohawk, and was baptized Catholic by Jesuit
missionaries. But she was ostracized and persecuted by other natives for
her faith, and she died in Canada when she was 24. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_VATICAN_SAINTS?SITE=NVLAS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT It is a long overdue honor for the Native Americans and it also nice to have another American cannonized as well.
Now, if we can only get an American Pope.
No comments:
Post a Comment