[Pastor Isaac Peters]

We've long known that the Romanists are not above incorporating Graeco-Roman and Celtic paganism into their worship to con people into joining their cult, but now they're openly doing the same thing with injun pantheism.

From the JYT:

Complex Emotions Over First American Indian Saint

JANEFONDA, N.Y. — The last time the Vatican canonized saints from along this stretch of the Mohawk River, it was 1930, and more than 35,000 Catholic pilgrims came to mark the occasion. The Jesuits here constructed a coliseum-size church to hold the crowds, and placed wooden statues of the new saints at the peaks of its stockadelike altar.

Those saints, three of them, were French Jesuits, tortured and murdered in the 17th century by the Mohawk Indians they were seeking to convert, according to the church. But in a twist of history, this October the Vatican will canonize a fourth saint from the Mohawk Valley: Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman born in 1656, a decade after the missionaries were killed in her village.

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“At a time when natives are still treated like third-class citizens, it’s very impressive that the Vatican and the Catholic Church is finally recognizing her,” said Pat Whyland, 67, a Mohawk from Syracuse, who offered a prayer to Kateri, as well as to the water, wind and sun, at the start of a small powwow held at her shrine in Janefonda in early July. “Not everyone knows about her,” she added, “but once you become familiar with her, you become very attached to her and her story.”

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“I don’t look at it like she gave up her native beliefs,” he said as he got a Mohawk Bear Clan tattoo in a tent at the powwow. “She added to her faith.”

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The shrine emphasizes the inclusion of American Indian practices. Behind the altar, the four major medicine plants — cedar, tobacco, sage and sweet grass — are represented, along with crosses and a portrait of Kateri in prayer. On the lawn, there are prayers to the Great Spirit posted alongside biblical readings. Sage smoke, the Mohawk language and drums are incorporated into the Mass when some of the nation’s estimated 680,000 American Indian Catholics come to pray.

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“She can help us by connecting us together,” he said. She may be a saint of the Catholics, he said, but as a Mohawk she can signify the sacredness of all life. “We are all saints,” he said. “You, me, Mother Earth. The wetlands.”