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One day in February 2006, six-year-old Jake Finkbonner was playing in a peewee basketball game in his hometown of Bellingham, Washington. With less than a minute left on the clock, he got pushed from behind. He crashed into the metal base of the portable hoop and cut his lip. His father and coach, Donny Finkbonner, figured Jake was in for a garden-variety fat lip. “Put some ice on it,” he instructed.

But overnight, a fever took hold of Jake and his face began to swell. His parents checked him into Seattle Children’s Hospital. The swelling continued. Soon Jake’s skin was so puffy that his eyes were crimped shut. He was diagnosed with a rare disease, necrotizing fasciitis. The flesh-eating bacteria was crawling across his face with frightening speed. Dr. Richard Hopper, chief of plastic surgery at Seattle Children’s, told National Public Radio, “It was almost as if you could watch it moving in front of your eyes. The redness and the swelling—we would mark it, and within the hour it would have spread another half-inch.”

The surgeons at Seattle Children’s began operating on Jake. Almost every day for two weeks, they cut infected skin away from the boy’s face. They told Donny Finkbonner and his wife, Elsa, that the disease was likely fatal. The Finkbonners, who are Lummi Indian Catholics, called in their priest to administer last rites, and the priest suggested that the couple pray to Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawk Indian ascetic who died in 1680 and was one miracle away from sainthood.

On the Lummi Indian Reservation, outside Bellingham, the Kateri Circle at Saint Joachim Catholic Church began holding special prayer sessions. So did the students at Assumption Catholic School, where Jake was in kindergarten. Their prayers went viral, and the kids began hearing from relatives: “We’re praying for him in Denver!” “We’re praying for him in London!” “We’re praying for him in Israel!”

At St. Joseph of Peace, a Catholic convent in Seattle, a nun named Julie Codd was praying, too, and a couple of days after Jake’s fall, she telephoned a colleague, Sister Kateri Mitchell, in Great Falls, Montana.

Sister Kateri is Mohawk. When she entered the convent fifty years ago, she adopted the name of her holy forebear. In her apartment in Great Falls, she keeps a relic from the Blessed Kateri—a sixteenth-inch-long sliver of wristbone.

The bone was probably chipped from Tekakwitha’s skeleton in 1972, when her corpse was last exhumed. It is now encased in a tiny glass reliquary roughly the size of a half-dollar.

Julie Codd asked Mitchell to bring the relic to Seattle for Jake. When Mitchell landed—it was now two weeks since the boy’s fall—Codd drove her directly to Seattle Children’s Hospital, where Jake was lying in bed, recovering from his twelfth surgery. Jake’s doctors were in the room by this point, quietly standing away from the bed, by the door, watching and waiting, Mitchell told me.

“I don’t know exactly where we placed the relic,” she said. “It was just this tiny little body, and it was all draped in white sheets. Probably it was somewhere around his rib cage. We placed it there, and then we prayed for the intercession of Blessed Kateri.”

Sister Kateri and Julie Codd were in the hospital room, praying, for perhaps five minutes. Then the nuns left the building. “And then,” Mitchell told me, “the infection stopped. It stopped that same day.”

Jake’s surgeon, Richard Hopper, would soon confirm that, indeed, the necrotizing fasciitis had stopped suddenly. One day the bacteria was spreading, the next day it was done. In talking to a reporter, Hopper described the halt as almost eerie, likening Jake’s infection to “a geyser coming out of the earth with this great roar. All of a sudden,” he said, “it just stops. And there’s silence. And everybody’s just a little bit stunned by it being over.”

Jake’s mother, Elsa, remains happily shocked. “All I can compare it to,” she told me when we spoke on the phone this fall, “is that movie It’s a Wonderful Life. You know the part where George comes back to life on Christmas morning? We watch that movie, my husband and I, and then we just look at each other and we think, That’s the exact same scenario with Jake. To me, what happened is a miracle. There is no other way to explain it.”

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