The first saints came to America with the Spanish. With the nation’s discovery erroneously attributed to the appropriately named Christopher Columbus (whose patron St. Christopher was that of travel), the Spanish forcibly spread Roman Catholicism through their rapidly acquired colonial holdings in North, South, and Central America. Early American place names reflect the rigid piety and devout religiosity of the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, such as San Salvador (named after Christ the savior), and Catholic missionaries from orders like the Dominicans and Franciscans spread the religion among the conquered indigenous population. The story of Catholic saints and to a lesser extent Orthodox and Anglican saints (as well as various Protestant “saints”) takes place after the discovery of the Americas and can be broken into two separate subjects: how Old World saints were reimagined in this new landscape (through indigenous religious syncretism as well as among the orthodox) and the canonization of American figures as new saints. Following the Spanish came the French as well as generations of European Catholic immigrants, all of whom helped to define what the idea of sainthood would mean in the New World.
In the Catholic Church a saint is defined as someone who is recognized as having bypassed any sort of penitential state upon death so as to immediately go to heaven. The church emphasizes that it does not make saints but rather recognizes the existence of individuals who through remarkable faith or martyrdom (which is then demonstrated through the evidence of miracles) have achieved this status. Throughout its history the process of canonization and the steps that must be gone through before sainthood has varied, yet the one universal has always been devotion on the part of the church and its members to those who are considered saints. Saints are central to Roman Catholic identity and theology, and they function as intercessory agents on behalf of penitents who often address specific saints in prayer. Saints are frequently associated with either a place, a profession, or a concept for which they are a patron saint, and prayers to these saints usually deal with the particular saint’s association. For example, someone who is about to go on a long voyage may direct a prayer to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travel, or somebody in a precarious and seemingly hopeless situation may ask for the assistance of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. In the various Orthodox churches, including the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church, the veneration of saints occupies a position similar to that in the Roman Catholic Church.
The celebration of saints was one of the primary complaints against the Catholic Church leveled by sixteenth-century Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. These figures argued that prayer to saints and veneration of relics constituted a dangerous pagan idolatry and should be eliminated from worship. Out of the incredible multiplicity of Protestant denominations that the Reformation generated, there is a wide diversity of opinion on the saints. Some Lutherans see no problem with referring to biblical figures of known holiness as saints, whereas Calvinists consider the veneration of any entity other than God as a deflection from the proper object of worship. The Anglican Church is a more complicated issue, since the Church of England has often tried to negotiate a via media or middle way between both Protestantism and Catholicism. As such, some Anglicans do venerate the saints in a way that is very similar to Catholics.
One central group of American saints is the North American Martyrs, or eight French Jesuits who lost their lives at the hand of the Iroquois. They were killed in the process of trying to convert the Huron of Ontario and New York who were at the time engaged in conflict with the Iroquois. Three of the eight were martyred along the Mohawk River in what would later become the United States side of the border with Canada. They were St. René Goupil, St. Isaac Jogues, and St. Jean de Lalande. Goupil died in 1642, tortured and killed with a tomahawk after teaching Iroquois children the sign of the cross. Jogues was martyred in 1646 after a period of enslavement by the Mohawk and was ransomed by Dutch traders. Lalande was killed in the process of trying to rescue Jogues’s body. The three North American Martyrs were the first to be canonized in what would be the United States, receiving official recognition from Pope Pius XI in 1930.
The first American saint to be canonized was St. Frances Cabrini in 1946. Her accomplishments reflected the importance of Catholic immigrant communities to the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1889 to minister to the needs of the massive Italian immigrant population in that city. She went on to found dozens of schools, hospitals, and orphanages in cities across the country, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Denver. Cabrini is the first recognized saint who died a U.S. citizen, becoming the patron saint of immigrants. She was beatified and canonized in 1946 after her supposed intercession in curing a child of his blindness.
The first saint who was born a citizen of the United States was St. Katharine Drexel, born in Philadelphia in 1856. She grew up among the city’s privileged set but ended up devoting her life to religion upon witnessing the death of her stepmother from cancer. She became fascinated by the traditions of the western Plains Indians, and upon taking religious orders, she devoted her life to ministering to both American Indians (particularly the Navajo) and African Americans. With the death of her banker father, she inherited a fortune, which she used in the founding of schools throughout the United States.
One particularly interesting saint who was born in what would be the United States is the seventeenth-century Iroquois woman Kateri Tekakwitha. Sometimes known as the Lily of the Mohawks, in 2012 Tekakwitha became the first Native American to be canonized (though more have the precanonization classification of “blessed”). Born in 1656 in what would today be upstate New York, Tekakwitha lived on both sides of what would be the border between the United States and Canada, and she remains important to the cultural identity of many Canadian Catholics. She is known for practicing “mortification of the flesh,” the extreme denial of basic pleasure and the infliction of pain upon oneself for spiritual purposes, as well as for a lifelong commitment to virginity. Her conversion ostracized her from her tribe, and she was attached to various French missions throughout her life, dying in 1680. Her epitaph read, “The fairest flower that ever bloomed among red men.”
The presence and importance of the saints in American culture and religion goes beyond those saints who were born or martyred in what would become the United States, but also includes the veneration of saints from the Old World. Immigrant communities often brought with them their most popular saints—such as St. Patrick for the Irish or St. Joseph for the Italians—as markers of ethnic identity and solidarity. The requirement that each Catholic church must contain at least one relic guaranteed connection to the lands that immigrants came from. In this way the saints of Europe, Asia, and Africa took on new life in the new world with new cultural practices and understandings surrounding them. Sometimes this took on the form of religious syncretism. In a manner reminiscent of how Europe first became Christianized, some saints were conflated with indigenous gods so that forced converts would be able to secretly practice their non-Christian religions. This is seen in both Mexican American folk Catholicism and the African American Caribbean folk religion of Voudoun. In both of these traditions and others like them, Roman Catholic saints were often conflated with figures from traditional religion, first as a means of secretly practicing ancient rites, and then as an example of a new, blended religious understanding.
American Saints
Elizabeth Ann Seton (née Bayley) was born in 1774 and founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph in 1809, a few years after her husband’s death. A convert to Catholicism, Seton faced anti-Catholic prejudice typical of the era. Seton died in 1821. Canonized in Rome in 1975, Elizabeth Seton was the first native-born American saint. When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, President Obama presented him with the key to Seton’s home. During the same papal visit, Junipero Serra, an eighteenth-century Spanish missionary, became the first saint canonized on American soil. A figure of reverence among many in the Latino community, Serra is the subject of much controversy among Native Americans, who claim he brutalized those he sought to convert. As Catholic strands have become woven into the fabric of American life, the stories of its saints and sinners have become a part of our common lore.
C. Fee
One can see which saints are particularly popular by examining the saints’ names that are most common in naming churches. Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox churches all often use saints’ names in designating individual parish churches. The most popular saints for churches to be named after are John, Paul, Mary, Peter, and James. It reflects the importance of saints who are mentioned in the New Testament, particularly members of Jesus’s immediate family, such as his mother Mary and his brother James (though Catholics and Protestants historically disagree as to the exact nature of Jesus and James’s relationship). Other popular saints’ names for churches include the first martyr, Stephen; the archangel Michael, who cast Satan out of heaven; Francis, the miracle-working medieval Italian mystic; Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland; and Anthony, who is popular in Italian American communities. The idea of the saints is a tradition from the Old World, but it has found a vibrant reception in the New.
Edward Nathan Simon
See also Our Lady of Guadalupe
Further Reading
Cormack, Margaret, ed. 2007. Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Gillis, Chester. 1999. Roman Catholicism in America. New York: Columbia University Press.
Howard-Johnston, James, and Paul Antony Hayward, eds. 1999. The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weiser, Francis X. 1958. “The Veneration of the Saints.” Catholic.org. https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/activities/view.cfm?id=1282. Accessed October 5, 2015.