Everyday we drive down the same road to our home and from our home.
Everyday for two years the road we would drive down would pass a field with a little statue to Bl. Kateri and say "One of these days we are going to stop and see what that is all about."
Well, about a month and a half ago we finally stopped.I was ashamed of myself when I read the history of that very field.
The place where Kateri lived for much of here life, Caughnawaga, near the village of Fonda, New York has been marked since 1938 by the Fonda Memorial of Catherine Tekakwitha. The Indian village site was discovered in 1950, a Holy Year, by Father Thomas Grassman, a Conventual Franciscan Friar and founder of the shrine. In that year, Father Thomas unearthed the postmolds where the stockade around the Indian Settlement at Fonda had been, and between then and 1957, with the help of numerous volunteers excavated the rest of the site. Today it is the only completely excavated Iroquois Indian village in the country.
Visitors to the village, which sits on a hill above the Mohawk-Caughnawaga museum and the shrine chapel, can see clearly the outlines of the twelve longhouses and stockade which existed there 300 years ago.
(I will have top stop the car and take some pictures to share in the near future.)
The very next weekend when we attended Mass in Auriesville, it was Kateri's Feast Day. I decided this was a "sign" to take up the cause to have Bl.Kateri canonized.
If anyone else has any special prayers to Bl. Kateri or devotion, I would love to hear about it.