The Catholic Church has accompanied the Indigenous people “since the very beginning,” said Shawn Phillips, director/pastoral minister of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ Office of Indian Ministry and at Gichitwaa Kateri in Minneapolis. Fourteen Franciscan missionaries accompanied Cortez on his journey to conquer Mexico, he said, but humans wandered from the path of bringing faith to the New World.
“One of the prime messages of Our Lady of Guadalupe was, ‘Do not treat my native people any differently than any (others),’” Phillips said. She appeared in native garb and spoke to Juan Diego in his local language “to remind us that we need to treat people with respect because they’re created in the image and likeness of the creator,” he said. “And we now need to correct some of those mistakes that people made along the way and truly bring the vision of the Church here so that we can all have the peace that God offers us.”
Shawn Phillips
Phillips recently joined “Practicing Catholic” radio show host Patrick Conley to describe a national conference focused on Indigenous people that will be held in Bloomington, Minnesota, in July 2023. Phillips, a member of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ advisory board for American Indian ministry, is a parishioner of Ascension in north Minneapolis but also attends liturgies at Gichitwaa Kateri in Minneapolis every Sunday.
People working at reservations and in Indian ministry started the annual Tekakwitha Conference in 1939 for their own support and to stay knowledgeable, Phillips said. The conference will celebrate “who we are as Native and Catholic in this area,” he said. “We have very specific tribal groups we work with here, especially the Dakota and Ojibwe,” he said, “whereas we will have people from Alaska, from Mexico, from Canada, from all over the United States, southwest, northeast, coming together to pray, to learn and to share what’s going on in Indian country in their world.”
This year’s Tekakwitha Conference — named for the same saint as Gichitwaa Kateri, St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th-century convert known as the “Lily of the Mohawks” who was canonized in 2012 — is July 20-23 in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Conference attendees will see the richness that the Church can bring to a different culture, Phillips said — something he finds both at Gichitwaa Kateri, where liturgies include Ojibwe and Lakota language, as well as at other parishes that celebrate members’ ethnicities.
“When I start looking at the different cultures of the world, all saying this message, it really, truly brings me into what it means to be universal and Catholic today,” he said.
A local Ojibwe artist has created a logo for the conference, Phillips said, whose theme is “gathering for healing through living waters.”
To learn more about the Tekakwitha Conference, visit tekconf.org. To hear the full interview, tune in to the 9 p.m. July 15 “Practicing Catholic” show, which repeats at 1 p.m. July 16 and 2 p.m. July 17 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM. Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes interviews with Jonathan Liedl, senior editor at the National Catholic Register, who discusses Catholic journalism; and Father Tony O’Neill, pastor of St. John Neumann in Eagan, who describes an upcoming retreat at his parish on healing conducted by the John Paul II Healing Center.
Listen to their interviews after they have aired at:
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