The Cross That Can't Be Lost

Françoise Gonannhatenha was forced to mount the wooden scaffold upon which the Onondaga Iroquois tortured their enemies.

But quite an unusual enemy she made. She was an Onondaga by birth, and the ones who now stood poised to take her life were friends and relatives, including a sister who had handed her over to the elders for execution.

What did this woman do to merit such mistreatment from her own people?

Françoise had been baptized years before by Father Jacques Fremin on his visit to Onondaga. She had lived as an Iroquois Christian among her people, but persecution made her leave her homeland and join other Christian Iroquois at Sault St. Louis, where she was known for her modesty, piety, and above all charity to the poor.

The devout settlement at the Sault, though mainly Iroquois by blood and language, remained close allies of the French, and so their former countrymen declared them enemies of state.

In 1692, an Iroquois army apprehended Françoise, her husband and two friends in a canoe. They mercilessly killed her husband, and dragged the three women back to Iroquoia, pulling their fingernails out and burning the tips of their bloody fingers in pipe-bowls. The other two women were sent to two other Iroquois villages, and Françoise was remanded back to Onondaga, where she was condemned to death.

Yet she remained undaunted. Mounting the torture platform, she loudly declared to the crowd that she was a Christian, and was happy to die in her own village at the hands of her own nation. In this, she added, she was only following the example of the Lord Himself.

Her piety annoyed her relatives, and one of them tore away the crucifix that had been hanging around her neck. He then took a knife and carved a cross into her breast.

“There you see,” he mocked, “the cross which you esteemed so much and which prevented you from leaving the Sault, when I went to seek you there.”

“I thank you, my brother,” she replied. “I can lose that cross which you have taken away from me, but you have given me one which I will never lose, not even in death.”

Marked with the sign of salvation, Françoise boldly preached from the scaffold:

“As frightful are the torments which you condemned me to, do not believe that my fate is to be pitied. It is yours which requires pity and groans. This fire, which you have lit for my torture, will only burn me for a few hours, but another fire which is never extinguished is prepared for you in Hell. It is however still in your power to avoid it: follow my example, become Christians, live according to the Laws of the Religion as saints, and you will escape from the eternal flames. Moreover, I declare to you that I wish those no ill, who I see are ready to snatch my life. Not only do I pardon them for my death, but I pray the sovereign Master of Life to open their eyes to truth, to touch their hearts, to give them the grace of conversion and to die in the sentiments that now inspire me.”

These exhortations only increased the fury of her torturers. She was taken down, and for three days was dragged around the village, subjected to all manner of cruelties and insults. Then, on the fourth day they returned her to the scaffold to begin the hideous final act of her martyrdom. Tying Françoise to the stake, they burned her entire body with red hot firebrands and gun barrels for many hours. Under all this agony she did not cry out.

At last they scalped her, threw hot cinders upon her bleeding head, and untied her—expecting she would run about in agony the way so many other victims had done.

Instead the pious widow knelt down next to the stake, lifted her eyes, and offered her last breaths as a final sacrifice to God. They rained down upon her a shower of stones, and overwhelmed, this holy Christian Iroquois finally gave up her soul to God.

Salvation on a Stick

In the Year of Our Lord 1838, Fathers François Blanchet and Modeste Demers traveled to Fort Vancouver at the behest of the bishop of Quebec. The mission entrusted to these two priests was simple on its face, but it was also impossibly vast in its scope. They were to spread the message of the Gospel throughout the Pacific Northwest, in a region that stretched from California to Alaska.

The Fathers, clearly, would need help. They managed to get a few literate white men to serve as catechists for settlers, but this approach would not serve with the native tribes of the area. Each tribe had its own language, and though some were closely related, others were so different that they would have to be learned from scratch. There was the Chinook Jargon, which served as a sort of general inter-tribal language of the Northwest Coast, but it was only a simplified pidgin language useful primarily for trading scenarios, not for teaching theology.

Relying on interpreters, then, the missionaries began to observe how their interpreters very naturally used the native love for rhetoric and oratory to give “a new force and new weight” to Catholic doctrine—in languages that white men could only stammer in.

Blanchet and Demers thus determined that those best suited to catechize the Indians were Indians themselves. But how to transform a mere interpreter into a trained catechist, capable not only of understanding but also teaching the vagaries of doctrine? And how best to communicate theological truths to such catechists, when knowledge of their languages was still crude?

The answer came from an old tradition ingrained in native Northwestern culture itself. Catholicism would be achieved the way Indians had from time immemorial recorded the history of their families and tribes: on a totem.

“In looking for a plan,” Blanchet writes, “[I] imagined that by representing on a square stick, the forty centuries before Christ by 40 marks; the 33 years of our Lord by 33 points, followed by a cross: and the 18 centuries and 39 years since by 18 marks and 39 points, would pretty well answer [my] purpose, in giving [me] a chance to show the beginning of the world, the creation, the fall of the angels, of Adam; the promise of a Savior, the time of His birth, and His death upon the cross, as well as the mission of the apostles.”

This miniature Catholic totem pole was called the “Sahale” stick from the name for God in Chinook.

Abandoning theological abstraction for a straightforward historical narrative proved a masterful stroke of evangelization. Like a tribal or familial totem, the Sahale stick was a symbolic retelling of salvation history in visual terms the natives of the Northwest could readily understand.

All that remained was to put it to the test.

Blanchet had one carved for Tslalakum, a visiting chief of the Straits Salish. After a mere eight days of instruction Tsalakum had mastered the concepts engraved on the stick, and brought it back to his native land. As word spread to other tribes, Blanchet made and gave away eight more at Nisqually in 1839.

Hand-carving the four-foot sticks however, quickly proved too laborious for the burgeoning demand, so Blanchet and Demers switched to drawing the Sahale symbols on paper and calling these pictures “Catholic ladders.”

Almost a year after giving the first stick to Tslalakum, Blanchet was finally able to visit his tribal home on Whidbey Island, hoping to follow up on the chief’s visit with some basic catechesis.

Amazingly, he found a tribe already well familiar with the tenets of Christianity. Chief Tslalakum’s eight days of instruction had produced an entire tribe that not only knew the main points of the faith, but had also managed to learn some hymns as well. Tslalakum had given his first Sahale stick to another chief and made a copy for himself. And chiefs like Witskalatche, Netlam and Sehalapan had similar resounding successes in lands where no priest had ever stepped foot.

The Sahale stick, by successfully “baptizing” an ancient native practice of the Northwest Coast, had proved both a wonderfully ingenious way to teach the faith to the Indians, and also to enrich the cultural patrimony of the whole universal Church.

The Kateri Before Saint Kateri

In the Year of Our Lord 1654 an Iroquois army plunged into the Erie homeland, destroying their main villages of Gentaienton and Rigué. Erie survivors fled deep into the woods and disappeared thereafter from the pages of history, as the triumphant Iroquois returned home with spoils and captives. Among these latter was a young Erie woman named Gandeaktena—and it would later be said that the “misfortune of her country proved the blessing of the captive.”

Gandeaktena was adopted into the Oneida nation of the Iroquois, and was present in 1667 when the Jesuit Jacques Bruyas came to preach in their village. Moved intensely by the Gospel message, her husband Tonsahoten, a fellow captive of the Huron tribe and a Christian, encouraged her to follow her inclinations. She began meeting with Bruyas for instruction, helped him learn the Iroquois language and attended chapel regularly.

Her pagan relatives attempted unsuccessfully to dissuade her from Christianity, but they only served to increase Gandeaktena’s desire to leave the Oneida village and settle among the French where she could worship in freedom. So later in 1667 she assembled a little band of seven souls and journeyed to Montreal over the ice. Baptized by Bishop Laval, she took the name Catherine (or Kateri in Iroquois), and then moved with her husband to establish a brand new settlement near Montreal called La Prairie or Caughnawaga.

From these humble beginnings sprang the great Iroquois mission at Caughnawaga which became renowned for its piety and religiousness. “He has gone to La Prairie,” would become the Indians’ catchphrase for conversion.

Catherine Gandeaktena’s virtues played no small part in the reputation of the famous mission she founded. Called by the Indians the “Mother of the Poor”, the “Good Christian” and the “Pillar of the Faith”, her cabin was a haven for the poor and discontented, and she instructed and catechized many who lived in or passed through the village. So great a charity beat in her noble heart that her confessor had to prescribe limits to it—she was accustomed to “give the best of what she had, and in a quantity which was even excessive.” Catherine founded the Confraternity of the Holy Family, a group of very devout converts, who said as many as 20 rosaries per day and were the mainstay of the mission’s Catholic life.

After five years of devoted charity, Catherine convinced her husband to give away the last bit of wampum they owned, offering them first before the Blessed Sacrament:

“My God, four years ago, I gave to you my Body and soul, and the greater portion of my goods. Here is what remains to me; I present it to you with all my heart. What should I now ask of you after having given you my all, unless it be that, from this moment, you take me yourself, to place me near you?”

The very next day Catherine was struck by a headache and fever. She sensed with joy that the Lord had answered her prayer. Loved ones crowded around her bedside as her husband attended her needs, and the ministering priest had her pray for her own recovery. But she quickly added:

“It has been impossible for me to say from the heart what I have just uttered with the lips. Why ask to remain on earth, since God is calling me to heaven?”

Soon after receiving the last sacraments Catherine became delirious. Her husband continually exhorted everyone to say rosaries on her behalf, and after 8 days of their “unceasing prayer” she slipped into a final peaceful coma.

Catherine Gandeakteana died to this world on November 6, 1673. Her husband distributed all her remaining goods to the poor, asking only for prayers for her soul. It was generally believed however, by Black Robe and Indian alike, that her soul had attained the final bliss of heaven.

Only a few years later another Catherine, surnamed Tekakwitha, would seek refuge at Caughnawaga, and her own reputation would eclipse that even of her predecessor. But it was the holy example of Catherine Gandeaktena that prepared the seed-bed for Saint Kateri’s arrival, by founding a flourishing community of Christian Iroquois at Caughnawaga, the very soil in which the “Lily of the Mohawks” would bloom.

Intro to Tales from the Catholic Frontier

Way back in the days of newspapers (remember those?), I had put together a weekly column called "Tales from the Catholic Frontier" and was shopping it around to various Catholic papers.

The idea behind he column was that I would take about 700 words to tell a brief story from American Catholic history--typically ones that weren't well known. I figured I always had my shovel out anywyay digging up some old bit of church lore, so I might as well put what I found to good use.

So I wrote three sample columns and mailed out some packets. But though I got some positive comments on that proto-venture there were no commitments. So the three samples went back to sleep on my old Mac's hard drive, called up once in a while for nostalgia's sake only to be put back into electronic storage again.

Fast forward to today when, in yet another research foray after a shiny new bit of treasure, I found something that piqued my writing instinct. Soon I had yet another contribution to add to the mix, so I decided to wake the ol' guys out of their slumber and publish everything here.

Enjoy!