Last week's cross came from the hands of the Saint Kateri Tekawitha Statue along the Chapel Trail!
The statue of Saint Kateri originally rested outside of Saint Olaf Catholic Church in Minneapolis until the church burned down in 1953.
When the statue was installed at its present location in 1956, it replaced a crucifix there, the corpus of which had been crafted by Father Cornelius Wittman, OSB shortly after the foundation of Saint John's Abbey.
Saint Kateri Tekawitha was a Algonquin-Mohawk laywoman from present day New York state that converted to Catholicism as a late-teen. During her short life, she was pressured to marry against her will and shunned for her Catholic beliefs. She was canonized in 2012 and is the patroness of ecologists, environmentalists, those who have lost parents, those in exile, those ridiculed for their piety, and indigenous people of the Americas, such as the Dakhota and Anishinaabe peoples who at one point called the land Saint John's University rests on home.
Saint Kateri today overlooks Lake Sag and has greeted SOT/Sem students and faculty on their way out to Stella Maris Chapel for decades.
Now, it's time for our next A-Cross Saint John's photo-clue of the week!
