New Saint Kateri Tekawitha Shrine in New Mexico
St. Kateri Tekakwitha spent her short
life in what is now New York State and Quebec Province, having been
introduced to the Catholic faith by French missionaries. But her name is
being proudly used for a new shrine in New Mexico, where Spanish friars
led many Native Americans to the faith in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The choice of her patronage is not the result of some kind of
cultural ignorance, but due to the fact that St. Kateri is patron saint
of Native Americans. People like Bishop James S. Wall of Gallup, New
Mexico, Carl Anderson of the Knights of Columbus, and William McCarthy
of the Southwest Indian Foundation believe Native Americans can really
use her heavenly intercession right now.
They know they can also use some real practical help as well.
When they thrust shovels into the desert earth outside of Gallup on
Sunday to break ground for a major new American shrine, they knew they
were well on the way to providing both.
Bishop Wall, Anderson, McCarthy, and Fr. Henry Sands, director of the
National Black and Indian Foundation, were joined by tribal
representatives at the ceremony to kick off the new Shrine of St. Kateri
Tekakwitha, to be built on the grounds of the diocesan Sacred Heart
Retreat House. The shrine will feature a larger-than-life Rosary walk.
“This Rosary walk will imitate the example of St. Kateri’s life, and
we will take advantage of the natural beauty that God offers to us, as
the Rosary will wind its way through the beautiful landscape that he’s
already given to us,” Bishop Wall told a gathering at Sunday’s
groundbreaking. “We will rely on the intercession of Our Lady, under the
title of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who we know first appeared to an
Indigenous person, that being St. Juan Diego. And so this shrine will be
a special place for everyone, but especially to the indigenous people
of this land, the Native American peoples of this land.”
The project was announced at the Knights of Columbus Supreme Convention in Minneapolis last week.
“Some indigenous peoples of North America embraced the Catholic faith
long before many of our ancestors set foot on these shores,” Anderson
said. “Today, in the United States, as many as one in four Native
Americans are Catholic. And yet, in many ways, these brothers and
sisters in the faith have been forgotten. … Despite many hardships,
neglect, and a history of brutality toward them, still they hold fast to
our Catholic faith.”
Anderson said the Knights hope that in the years to come the St.
Kateri Shrine will become a “national spiritual home for Native
Americans and for all Catholics in North America.”
“They’re trying to do two things: evangelize the Native Americans
through the intercession of St. Kateri and her example, and they’ve been
trying to … get the attention of people to understand the needs of
folks out there,” said Erik Bootsma, the architect on the project.
Native peoples in the southwest, on balance, live below the poverty
level, McCarthy said in an interview, emphasizing that Gallup is the
poorest diocese in the United States, “and the vast majority of those
who live in the diocese are Native Americans.”
“The per capita income of the Navajo tribe, which is the largest
tribe by far in our area, is under $10,000 per capita,” he said.
“Massive unemployment, and then the people live in dwellings without
running water, electricity, dirt floors. It’s a third world country,
within the continental borders of the United States.”
To help alleviate that poverty, the Southwest Indian Foundation
builds about 20 homes a year and installs cooking and heating stoves;
provides scholarships for lower income, needy Native American children
so they can go to parochial schools; runs homes for women and children
who are victims of domestic violence, and provides alcohol counseling
and emergency assistance in the areas of food, clothing, heating fuel,
and temporary shelter.
It also provides a national outlet for Native
Americans to sell handmade goods. Profits go directly back to Native
Americans themselves in the form of philanthropic programs.
The Rosary walk will consist of 23 small shrines, 20 of them for the
different mysteries of the Rosary. “There’s a small shrine to Our Lady
of Guadalupe, which is kind of a little link of the Rosary, then four
different [groups of mysteries],” Bootsma explained in an interview.
“Each decade has its own little shrine, and they’re all kind of using
these little traditional niches or shrines that you’d find all over the
place around Mexico on churches, etc.”
It was Spanish missionaries from Mexico who first preached the Gospel
in the area, not long after the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe in
Mexico City in 1531.
He said that native artists and local
artists will be designing each niche, using glazed tile as their
materials. Each niche will cost about $10,000 to build, and the walk is
expected to be completed by August 2021.
“People can come and pray the Rosary every day and take a different path each day,” Bootsma said.
Said Bishop Wall, “My prayer for everyone who visits this—especially
the Native American peoples—is that you come and walk and pray the
Rosary walk, and as you leave the Rosary walk, that your faith might be
strengthened, and your hope might be strengthened in the world to come.”
