For 2 New Yorkers, long road to sainthood

FONDA -- No one making a religious pilgrimage to Catholic shrines in this scenic yet hardscrabble stretch of New York's Mohawk Valley is going to mistake it for Italy. Yet, starting next year the region can boast of being the home of two of the Roman Catholic Church's newest saints.

The Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian, spent most of her life here during the 17th century. About 200 years later and 40 miles to the west, the Blessed Mother Marianne Cope began a religious life that focused on providing medical care in central New York and the Hawaiian islands.

On Dec. 20 Pope Benedict XVI certified miracles attributed to the two women, the final step toward sainthood. The women's canonization is expected to happen this year.

They'll be among just 12 of the Catholic Church's thousands of saints who either were born in America or ministered in what is now the United States.

Elevation to sainthood for Blessed Kateri, a first for a Native American, is expected to boost visits to a pair of local shrines linked to her life. The National Shrine of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha in Fonda and the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in nearby Auriesville had already closed for the winter when word came out of the Vatican that the pope had affirmed the women for canonization.

Officials at both sites say they expect bigger crowds next year as a result.

"We've been praying for this for a long time, years and years and years," said Friar Mark Steed, the Kateri shrine's director. Spread over 200-plus acres of sloping ground on the river's north bank, the property contains the archaeological site of the Mohawk village where Kateri spent her youth and where she was baptized by French Jesuit missionaries in 1676.

Kateri was born in the Mohawk village that sat atop the hill where the Auriesville shrine was founded by the Jesuit order in the late 19th century. Known for tending to the sick and elderly, Kateri fell ill and died at 24. Her remains are entombed in a marble shrine at St. Francis Xavier Church in Kahnawake, Quebec.

Mother Marianne Cope's roots in the Mohawk Valley began in Utica, where her family settled in 1840 after emigrating from Germany the previous year, when she was a year old. A factory worker until she joined the Franciscan sisters in Syracuse in the early 1860s, the young nun worked as a nurse and hospital administrator, helping to found two hospitals -- St. Joseph's in Syracuse and St. Elizabeth's in Utica -- that are still in operation.

In the 1880s Mother Marianne answered a plea from Hawaii for help providing care for leprosy patients at a settlement on Molokai island run by Father Damien. She died of natural causes at the settlement in 1918 and was buried there. In 2005 her remains were brought to Syracuse, where they're in a reliquary located in the chapel at the St. Anthony Convent, which is also home to a Mother Marianne museum.