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“… An infinity of miraculous cures,” writes le P. Cholenec in 1715, “une infinité de guérisons miraculeuses.” Not only among the savages but even among the French at Québec and Montréal. It would take volumes. He calls her la Thaumaturge du Nouveau-Monde. With a sense of pain you must now be able to imagine, I record some of the cures.
The wife of François Roaner was 60 during January 1681 and close to death. She was an inhabitant of la Prairie de la Magdeleine, where le P. Chauchetière was also serving. The priest hung a crucifix around her neck. It was the same crucifix that Catherine Tekakwitha had grasped to her rags while dying. When Mme. Roaner was cured she refused to surrender the relic. The priest insisted but gave the woman a little bag of mud from the tomb of Catherine to hang in place of the crucifix. Some time later, she happened to take it off for one reason or another. As soon as it was clear of her head she collapsed, stricken to the ground. It was only when the bag returned to her chest that she recovered once again. A year later, her husband was seized by a violent pain in the kidneys. In a reckless instant of charity she removed the mud from her person and hung it over his neck. His pain stopped immediately, but she staggered, stricken again, crying out that her husband was murdering her. He was persuaded by several bystanders to return the little sack to his wife. She was instantly cured but his kidneys began again. Let us leave them here, in their new cruel service to Catherine Tekakwitha, as she invites their souls. Is this familiar, dear comrade? Did Edith move between us like a package of mud? Oh God, I see the miserable old Roaners, who had not touched each other for years, clawing each other like animals on the stone floor of their kitchen.
In 1693 the Superior at Sault was le P. Bruyas. Suddenly his arms became paralyzed. He was removed to Montréal to receive treatment. Before he left he asked the Sisters of Catherine, a group of devotees which had formed around her memory, to do a novena on behalf of his cure. In Montréal he refused all treatment. On the eighth day of the novena there was still no change in his stiff arms. Faithful, he kept the doctors away. Four o’clock on the next morning he awakened waving his arms, not surprised, but ravished with joy. He hurried to thank.
1695. The cures began to creep into the upper classes like a dance step. They began with the Intendant, M. de Champigny. For two years he had had the same cold, which worsened day by day, until now he could barely make himself heard. His wife wrote the Fathers at Sault, begging them to have a novena done to their holy girl in order to obtain her husband’s cure. The prayers they chose for the novena were one Pater, one Ave, and three Gloria Patri. M. de Champigny’s throat cleared up day by day, and on the ninth day it was normal – indeed, his voice possessed a special new resonance. Mme. de Champigny extended the cult of the Iroquois Virgin. She had thousands of Catherine Tekakwitha pictures distributed everywhere, including France, and even Louis XIV looked carefully at one.
1695. M. de Granville and his wife mixed the mud with a little water and fed it to their little daughter, who was dying. She sat up laughing.
“The power of Catherine extended itself even to animals,” writes le P. Cholenec. In Lachine lived a woman with only one cow. One day, for no apparent reason, the cow became so bloated, “enflée,” that the woman thought the beast would die. She fell to her knees.
– O good holy Catherine, have pity on me, save my poor cow!
She had barely spoken the words when the cow began to unswell, returning to its ordinary size right before her eyes, “et la vache s’est bien portée du depuis.”
Last winter, writes le P. Cholenec, a steer fell through the ice in Montréal. They hauled him out but his body was so frozen that he couldn’t walk. He was obliged to spend the winter in his stable.
– Kill that animal! commanded the master of the house.
– Oh, let him live one more night, a servant girl pleaded.
– Very well. But he dies tomorrow!
She put some of the tomb mud which she cherished into the steer’s drinking water, saying:
– Pourquoi Catherine ne guérirait-elle pas les bêtes aussi bien que les hommes?
This is the actual quotation. The next morning the steer was found on his feet, to the great astonishment of all except the girl and the animal. The most important question the histories naturally ignore. Were the cow and the steer eventually eaten? Or did nothing really change?
Thousands of cures, all recorded, among children and among the senile. A thousand novenas and a thousand bodies glow again. Twenty years after her death the miracles were not so frequent, but we have evidence as recent as 1906. Let us examine the April 1906 edition of Le Messager Canadien du Sacre-Coeur. The miracle took place at Shishigwaning, an Indian outpost on Ile Manitouline. Living there was a good Indian woman (une bonne sauvagesse) who had been afflicted, for the past 11 months, with syphilis ulcers in the mouth and throat. She had contracted the disease by smoking the pipe which belonged to her syphilitic daughter, “en fumant la pipe dont s’était servie sa fille.” The disease advanced hideously, the ulcers spreading and widening their circumferences and their crater depth. She couldn’t even take a little
