In February 2006, 5-year-old Jake Finkbonner fell and hit his head while playing basketball at his school in Ferndale, Wash. Soon, he developed a fever and his head swelled. His mother, Elsa, rushed him to Seattle Children’s Hospital, where the doctors realized Jake was battling a flesh-eating bacterium called Strep A.
“It traveled all around his face, his scalp, his neck, his chest,” she recalls, “and why it didn’t travel to his brain or his eyeballs or his heart? He was protected.”
Jake was protected, she says, by Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian who lived 350 years ago. She had converted to Catholicism and was considered holy enough by the Vatican to be elevated to “blessed” ”” one step before sainthood ”” in 1980. The Finkbonners are Lummi Indian, and their family and friends prayed that Kateri would intercede with God for Jake.
But the doctors’ efforts to get ahead of the infection were unsuccessful, and Jake was given his last rites. Then, suddenly, the infection stopped, stunning the doctors.
Blessed Kateri has always been a favorite of mine. I’m glad she’ll get to be a full-fledged saint. It’s high time we acknowledged the “Black Robe” era of history. (Speaking as an Anglican though, I’m glad the “relic” was only a pendant. I think we’re long past the time when it should be acceptable for the purloiner of a saint’s toe bone to be accounted a hero.)