[stfassisi]

An exact parallel to this phenomenon was the dramatic change in morals among the Christian converts after the evangelization which followed on Columbus' discovery of the Indies. One Papal document after another to the bishops of the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries assumes that those who had embraced Christianity were also living their Christian faith, especially in their practice of chastity and marital morality. A classic example of the spiritual heights that the former pagans could reach is the story of Kateri Tekakwitha. Born in what is now Auriesville, New York in 1656 (?), she died in Southern Canada in 1680. Her mother was a Christian Algonquin who was taken captive by the Iroquois and made the wife of a pagan chief of the Mohawk tribe. Tekakwitha was one of two children born of this coerced marriage. At the age of four, the girl was taken into the home of an uncle after she lost her father, mother and brother in a smallpox epidemic. The disease left her disfigured and with impaired eyesight. In 1667, she met her first Christian missionaries. But fear of her uncle kept her from taking instructions. Finally, in 1675 she was instructed in the Catholic Faith and baptized on Easter Sunday 1676. She took the name of Kateri or Katherine. Her conversion and virtuous life stirred up so much opposition that she had to flee for her life to a Christian Indian village two hundred miles away. Her life of extraordinary charity was joined with a private vow of chastity which placed her under superhuman pressure from those with whom she lived. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Her popular name of "Lily of the Mohawks" testifies to her heroic practice of chastity and the influence that her charity had in bringing her fellow Indians to accept the Gospel of Christ.

[stfassisi]

Ping!

[Coyoteman]

I don't want to rain on your parade, but you should know that in a number of areas of the Americas the death rate following colonization was 90%, if not greater.

This was the case in the coastal areas of Massachusetts in the 1600s, as well as the mission areas of California ca. 1769-1834.

[Between the Lines]

Doesn’t anybody read the copyright info anymore?

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