To help Catholics learn more about the lives of the saints, the U.S.
bishops’ conference has offered a list of 10 American saints for the
Year of Faith.
Jeannine Marino, program specialist for the bishops’ conference’s
Secretariat of Evangelization and Catechesis, created the list. As an
advisor to several causes for canonization and a postulator, she
researches the lives of proposed saints.
The list includes St. Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit missionary and North
American martyr who traveled to the New World from France. In 1641, the
Iroquois captured him and his companions. The Iroquois tortured and
killed most of his group. He was killed by a tomahawk in 1646.
St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, the foundress of the Missionary Sisters of
the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is also on the list. Known as Mother Cabrini,
she is the first U.S. citizen to be canonized.
She came to the U.S. from Italy as a missionary. In her 35 years in the
country before her death in 1917, she founded six institutions for the
poor, the uneducated and the sick. She is the patron saint of
immigrants.
The U.S. bishops’ secretariat also highlights St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born U.S. citizen to be named a saint.
She was a poor widow with five children who in the early 19th century
converted to Catholicism and founded the Sisters of Charity of St.
Joseph, the first order of religious women in the U.S. She helped begin
the first free Catholic school in the country.
Another of the Year of Faith saints is St. John Neumann, a Bohemia-born
Redemptorist priest who became the fourth Bishop of Philadelphia in
1852. He founded the first diocesan school system in the U.S. and helped
start almost 100 Catholic schools before his death in 1860.
St. Katharine Drexel, foundress of the Sisters of the Blessed
Sacrament, was a wealthy young woman from Philadelphia who became a
missionary to American Indians and African Americans and started many
schools and missions for them. She died at age 96 in 1955.
Pope John
Paul II canonized her in 2000.
The U.S. bishops have put forward the Society of the Sacred Heart
missionary St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, who arrived in U.S. territory
from France in 1818. She founded the first Catholic school for Native
Americans. The Pottowami Indians called her the Woman Who Prays Always.
St. Damien de Veuster, the Belgian-born missionary to the lepers of
Molokai, Hawaii, built schools, churches and hospitals for Leprosy
sufferers. He also made coffins for those who died.
He contracted leprosy but served until his death in 1889.
The bishops’ conference list includes two people whom Pope Benedict XVI
will canonize Oct. 21: Bl. Marianne Cope and Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha.
Bl. Marianne Cope, a Franciscan missionary to the lepers of Molokai,
was born in Germany and raised in New York. She became a leader in
health care in Syracuse, N.Y. before volunteering to care for the
outcast in Hawaii. She helped women and girls with leprosy and helped
educate them. She died in 1918.
Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lilly of the Mohawks,” converted to the
Catholic faith in the 17th century at the age of 19. Her conversion
angered her family. Her refusal to work on Sundays caused her Mohawk
village to deny her meals that day. She left her family for Montreal
where she could practice her faith freely. She took a vow of virginity
and lived a life of penance and extreme prayer before her death in 1680.
The Year of Faith lasts from Oct. 11 through Nov. 24, 2013. It is meant
to strengthen the faith of Catholics and to help evangelize.
It marks
the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council in
1962.