You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, August 20th, 2019. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we are talking about some great saints that celebrated their feast days over the summer.

We already talked about St. Maria Guretti. And today, we are talking about an incredible American saint who celebrated her

feast day on July 13th. This saint is St. Cateri. So St. Cateri is from the Americas.

Although I should be clear, she lived here before this was the United States,

and she also finished her life in what is now Canada. But St. Cateri was born in what we now see

as the northern part of New York State. She belonged to the Mohawk Indian tribe.

Now, at the time, this was not the United States, and the Indians were still very much

in control of the land.

However, Europeans had arrived on the North American continent.

And the Mohawks mostly had interaction with Westerners in the form of

missionaries. Many places in Europe had sent missionaries to come and spread the Christian faith.

Now, some of this did this with love and compassion, while others did it in other ways. So the Mohawk Indians,

some of them had converted to Christianity and others had actually grown to hate missionaries

and despise Christianity simply because of the uncharitable people that had tried to convert them.

So before St. Kateri was born, her mother had been converted to Christianity and she loved

Jesus Christ. However, at the time, a terrible disease called smallpox would go through an

Indian community and kill nearly everyone. At the

time, there was no medicine or way to treat the disease. So if you got it, you either died or

became horribly sick. St. Coteri's mother and father were both killed by smallpox.

In fact, San Kateri herself had it, but she survived.

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