Today the Church honors the Martyrs of Canada, also known as the Martyrs of North America.
Orate pro nobis.
Toward the end of his reign, Henry IV of France started to look at the possibility of ventures abroad, with both North America and the Levant being among the possibilities. In 1604, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain initiated the first important French involvement in North America. He founded Port Royal as the first permanent European settlement in North America north of Florida in 1605, and the first permanent French establishment at Quebec in 1608.
The first Jesuit mission in North America was established on Penobscot Bay in 1609, which was part of the French colony of Acadia; a second in 1611 in Terre-Neuve (Newfoundland); and a third mission was built on Mount Desert Island (an island off of Maine)in 1613, all of which failed. The Jesuits conceived plans to move their efforts to the banks of the Saint-Laurent river. A fourth mission was established in 1625, made by Fathers Charles Lalemant (as Superior), Enemond Massé, Jean de Brébeuf, and assistants François Charton and Gilbert Buret. This mission also failed following the occupation of Quebec by English forces in 1629. It was not until until 1632, with the arrival of the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune, that the fifth Jesuit mission found long-term stability. Between 1632 and 1650, 46 French Jesuits arrived in North America to preach the Gospel of Jesus among the First Nations peoples of Quebec and Canada.
This is the story of the fifth mission. Jesuit missionaries worked among the Huron (Wendat), an Iroquoian-speaking people who occupied territory in the Georgian Bay area of Central Ontario. (They were not part of the Iroquois Confederacy, initially made up of five tribes south and east of the Great Lakes.) The area of their traditional territory is called Huronia. The Huron in this area were farmers, fishermen and traders who lived in villages surrounded by defensive wooden palisades for protection. Sainte-Marie among the Hurons was the headquarters for the French Jesuit Mission to the Huron Wendat people.
By the late 1640s, the Jesuits believed they were making progress in their mission to the Huron, and claimed to have made many converts. But, the priests were not universally trusted. Many Huron considered them to be malevolent shamans who brought death and disease wherever they travelled, and they were right. After European contact, the Huron had suffered epidemics of smallpox and other Eurasian infectious diseases. By 1640, nearly half the Huron had died of smallpox and the losses disrupted their society. Many children and elders died. With their loved ones dying before their eyes, many Huron began to listen to the words of Jesuit missionaries who, unaffected by the disease, appeared to be men of great power.
The nations of the Iroquois Confederacy considered the Jesuits legitimate targets of their raids and warfare, as the missionaries were nominally allies of the Huron and French fur traders. Retaliating for French colonial attacks against the Iroquois was also a reason for their raids against the Huron and Jesuits. When the Jesuits in France decided to begin a new mission to bring the Gospel of Jesus to the indigenous peoples of New France, or present-day Canada, the newly ordained Fr. Jean de Brébeuf (b. 1593 – d. 1649) was ready. Already in his youth, he had made a vow never to refuse martyrdom if it came; and he knew that in this distant land full of vast forests, snow and warring tribes, it might come. He arrived in the territory of the Huron (Wendat) people in 1626. For twenty years he labored among this people, living with them, compiling the first dictionary of their language, and writing a catechism in Wendat. Echon, or “he who carries a heavy load,” the Hurons called him. Some of them accepted baptism.
�Gradually, others joined the mission: the Jesuits Fr. Isaac Jogues (b. 1607–d. 1646), Fr. Gabriel Lalement (b. 1610–d. 1649); Fr. Antoine Daniel (b. 1601–d. 1648); Fr. Charles Garnier (b. 1606–d. 1649); Fr. Noël Chabanel (b. 1616–d. 1649); the deaf lay brother René Goupil (b. 1609-d. 1642); and layman Jean de la Lande (d. 1646).
All were martyred, caught in the turbulent decades of European powers attempting to establish colonies in North America and the First Nations peoples fighting to keep their lands and freedom.
The Iroquois Confederacy was at war with the Hurons and saw the French missionaries as allies of their enemies. In 1642, an Iroquois war party captured Fr. Isaac Jogues and René Goupil, taking them to the Mohawk village of Ossernenon (present-day Auriesville, New York). The first of all the martyrs to suffer death was Rene Goupil, who was tomahawked to the head on September 29, 1642, for having made the Sign of the Cross on the brow of some children. This Rene Goupil was a remarkable man. He had tried hard to be a Jesuit and had even entered the Novitiate, but his health forced him to give up the attempt. He then studied surgery and found his way to Canada, where he offered his services to the missionaries, whose fortitude he emulated.
Fr. Jogues was tortured, several of his fingers cut off so that he could not celebrate Mass. Fr. Jogues was a slave for over a year, but eventually was ransomed by a Dutch Protestant pastor and returned to France, where he received a dispensation allowing him to celebrate Mass with mutilated hands. Torture could not dissuade him from the mission, however, and he returned to New France. In 1646, Fr. Jogues returned to Ossernenon with Jean de la Lande, attempting to negotiate a peace treaty; both were captured and killed.
Fr. Antoine Daniel, who had a gift for teaching Huron children and for music, was the next, and first priest, to be martyred. In 1634 Daniel travelled to Wendake with Frs. Jean de Brébeuf and Daoust. Daniel studied the Wendat (Huron) language and made rapid progress. He translated the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and other prayers into the Huron native tongue and set them to music. For two years, in what is now Quebec, he had charge of a school for Huron boys. He returned to Huronia in 1638 to relieve Fr. Brébeuf at the new mission.
He returned to Teanaostaye, the chief town of the Huron, in July 1648. Shortly thereafter on 4 July, the Iroquois made a sudden attack on the mission while most of the Huron men were away in Quebec trading. Fr. Daniel rallied the defenders. Before the palisades had been scaled, he hurried to the chapel where the women, children, and old men were gathered. He gave them general absolution and, immersing his handkerchief in a bowl of water, he shook it over them, baptizing the catechumens by aspersion. Fr. Daniel, still in his vestments, took up a cross and walked toward the advancing Iroquois. The Iroquois halted for a moment, then fired on him. They put Daniel's body into the chapel, which they had set on fire. Many of the Huron escaped during this incident. Father Ragueneau, his superior, wrote of him in a letter to the Superior General of the Jesuits as "a truly remarkable man, humble, obedient, united with God, of never failing patience and indomitable courage in adversity."
�Frs. Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were kidnapped in the present-day province of Québec the following year, after managing to warn some of the Huron villagers that Iroquois warriors were near. The martyrdom that Fr. de Brébeuf had vowed not to escape had come, and it was interminable. The two were made to run the gauntlet, and in mockery of the Christian Faith were tied to crosses, “baptized” with boiling water, and slashed with knives. Throughout the ordeal, Fr. de Brébeuf in particular prayed for the courage to suffer without crying out, for the sake of the warriors inflicting these sufferings. They valued courage, and he did not want them to think that Christians were weak. So impressed were they that when he died, they ate his heart so as to obtain a share in his bravery.
�Fr. Lalement had to watch as his confrere was killed first. “My strength is the strength of God,” he had once written, and this strength carried him through to the end.�
Frs. Charles Garnier and Noël Chabanel were killed later in the same year. Fr. Garnier reached the colony of New France in June 1636. He travelled immediately to the Huron mission with fellow Jesuit Pierre Chastellain. By early August, he had arrived among the Nipissings. He served for the rest of his life as a missionary among the Huron, never returning to France. The Huron nicknamed him Ouracha, or "rain-giver", after his arrival was followed by a drought-ending rainfall. He was greatly influenced by fellow missionary Fr. Jean de Brébeuf, and was known as the "lamb" to Brebeuf's "lion". From 1641 to 1646 Garnier was at the Saint-Joseph mission.
There were raids between Iroquois and Huron forces. When he learned that Brébeuf and Lalemant were killed in March 1649 by Iroquois after a raid on a Huron village, Garnier knew he too might soon die. On December 7, 1649, he was killed by musket fire from the Iroquois during an attack on the Petun village where he was living.
These deaths of these eight missionaries seemed like brutal failure after the sacrifices these men had endured for the mission. But God does not see as man sees. Later, Isaac Jogues’ killer would ask for baptism. And in Ossernenon, the same village where Isaac Jogues, René Goupil, and Jean de la Lande were killed, Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman who became the first Native American saint, would be born only ten years later. Today, the Catholic Church in North America acknowledges these eight men as the small, suffering seed from which it sprang.
Almighty God, by whose grace and power your holy Martyrs of Canada triumphed over suffering and were faithful even to death: Grant us, who now remember them in thanksgiving, to be so faithful in our witness to you in this world, that we may receive with them the crown of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.
Amen.
