Would it be a provocation? At the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada on residential schools for Aboriginals, in 2012, the Vatican proclaimed Kateri Tekakwitha saint and figure of unity (1656-1680), judged among the members of the First Nations victims of colonialism and missionary spirit. In 2022, Pope Francis seems to approve of the verdict of some Indigenous people, even daring to use the word “genocide”.
Jean-François Roussel, of the Institute of Religious Studies at the University of Montreal, devotes a very scholarly work to Kateri Tekakwitha, born in what is now New York State to a non-Christian Iroquois father and an Algonquin Catholic mother. She died in the Jesuit mission of Kahnawake, near Montreal. Roussel wonders: “Why tell such an embarrassing story? He gives his book a subtitle that is both beautiful and enigmatic: “Crossing the colonial mirror”.
The essayist demonstrates a rare discernment which allows the reader to understand the embarrassing nature of the role of Kateri Tekakwitha. Roussel points out that the innovative idea of “inculturation”, introduced in 1978 by the superior general of the Jesuits from 1965 to 1981, Father Pedro Arrupe, shattered the old missionary spirit and its intimate link with colonization.
Seventeenth-century Iroquois Catholicism, while new, remained culturally Iroquois, articulated with other native cultures of its time and with French missionary and settler culture. Kateri never ceased to be a Mohawk, in her soul and in her relationship to her body.
According to Arrupe, “the Christian life and message” should not be limited to a necessarily superficial “adaptation” to a given culture, but go, by a “unification” with this culture, to become “a new creation “. Fidelity to both Aboriginal spirituality and evangelical spirituality may seem paradoxical, especially since in Canada, the link between the two is hardly made.
As Roussel points out, “studies on the Iroquois have abounded for more than a century, but they remain strangely ignored by Catholic discourses about Kateri”. The essayist admits: “it is a lacuna to which [il] would like[t] remedy in” what he does not hesitate to call his “theological study”.
He is aware of the existence, in Arrupe, of a questioning of Jesuit elitism, illustrated above all by the classical colleges of the order. As a remedy, Arrupe, seen by progressive Jesuits as the “reformer” of the order, advocates the preferential option for the poor and excluded.
Died around the age of 24, suffering from semi-blindness caused by smallpox (in the Iroquois language, “Tekakwitha” means “she gropes her way forward”) and weakened by the extreme mortifications she inflicts on herself, despite the disagreement of Jesuits, to resemble the crucified Christ, Kateri Tekakwitha remains a “figure of division”, according to Roussel, between Iroquois faithful to their ancestral religion and those who, very much in the minority, dream of an original Catholicism dear to Arrupe. In such a Catholicism, Kateri Tekakwitha would incarnate, at the height of pathos, indigenous suffering.