NORTH AMERICAN MARTYRS

The word martyr has a very precise meaning in ecclesiastical literature. Those who bear the name do so only when a rigorous inquiry by the Church has attested to the fact that hatred of the faith motivated those who killed them. North America honors eight martyrs; all were of European and French origin and belonged to the missions of Canada, then called New France. Six of them were priests of the Society of Jesus: Isaac Jogues, Antoine Daniel, Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Noël Chabanel. The other two, René Goupil and Jean de la Lande, were donnés, lay assistants, who, without binding themselves by religious vows, worked for the Jesuit missions. Unsalaried, they received food, shelter, and help in case of illness from the fathers. All the martyrs died between Sept. 29, 1642 and Dec. 9,1649. They were beatified on June 21, 1925, and canonized June 29, 1930; their feast day is September 26. In terms of time and place of martyrdom, they make up two groups.

First Group. This included Goupil, Jogues, and la Lande, who were martyred near Auriesville, N.Y., at Ossernenon, seat of the Mohawk tribe in the U.S.

Goupil. He was born at Anjou, France, May 13, 1608; as a youth he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Paris, but was forced to leave because of deafness. He then studied surgery at the Orléans hospital; in 1640, he arrived in Canada, where he was assigned as donné to the Sillery mission near Quebec. As the infirmarian at Sillery and at the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, he set out for Huronia. When the flotilla taking him there fell into Iroquois hands, he was captured and underwent the rigors of barbaric torture. An Iroquois killed him with an axe stroke on Sept. 29, 1642, for having made the sign of the cross over a child. The first of this group of martyrs, he is the only one whose life has been told by another martyr, Jogues. The original of this document, which was recently translated into English, is kept in the archives of the College of St. Marie of Montreal. Catholic doctors of the U.S. honor Goupil as the first of their profession to have crossed the Adirondacks.

Jogues and la Lande. Jogues was born in Orléans, France, Jan. 10, 1607. In 1636, after ordination on July 2, he arrived in Quebec and was assigned to the Huron missions. He was taken with Goupil in 1642 as he was returning to the missions after a visit to Quebec, and he was subjected to all the cruelties that the Iroquois perpetrated on their prisoners. During his captivity he baptized 60 children and in midwinter conducted his annual retreat before an outdoor cross. He was ransomed by the Dutch of Fort Orange (Albany) in 1643, and he escaped to New York and thence to France. Urban VIII granted him a dispensation to celebrate Mass, despite his mutilated left hand, saying: "It would be shameful for a martyr of Christ not to drink the blood of Christ." In Canada again in the spring of 1644, Jogues was entrusted with a brief peace mission to the Iroquois. He departed Sept. 24, 1646, for Ossernenon, but a Mohawk war party captured him; on October 18 Jogues was tomahawked and the following day his companion la Lande suffered the same fate. Jogues was known to have desired the grace of martyrdom; so when the news of the double martyrdom reached Quebec in the spring of 1647, his fellow missionaries celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving rather than one of Requiem for the repose of his soul.

Second Group. This group—composed of Daniel, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, and Chabanel—met death within the actual confines of Canada; the first three were killed by the Iroquois, and Chabanel by a Huron apostate.

Daniel. This first martyr of Huronia was born in Dieppe, France, in 1601 and became a Jesuit novice at 20. He arrived at Cape Breton in 1632 and went to Quebec the following year. In 1634 he left for Huronia, where he remained, except for two years during which he served as director of the Huron seminary in Quebec. On July 4, 1648, he had just celebrated Mass when the mission of St. Joseph was overrun by Iroquois. After ministering to the wounded and baptizing some of them, he was struck by arrows and shot, and his trampled and desecrated body was then cast into the fire that consumed the chapel.

Brébeuf and Lalemant. Brébeuf was born at Condésur-Vire, Normandy, France, March 25, 1593, and had already been ordained when he arrived in Canada, June 1625. The English occupation of Quebec in 1629 necessitated his return to France, but he was able to get back to

his mission in 1633 and Huronia became his field of apostolate. Lalemant, born in 1610, was the nephew of Revs. Charles and Jerome Lalemant and had long dreamed of the Canadian missions. In 1646 he arrived at Quebec, but because of ill health, it was two years before he reached the Huron missions. There on March 16, 1649, an Iroquois band attacked the town of St. Ignace and captured Brébeuf and Lalemant, who were tied to stakes and underwent one of the worst martyrdoms ever recorded in history. Brébeuf suffered for three hours before dying; Lalemant died the following morning, March 17. The Relation states: "Before their death both their hearts were torn out through an opening made in their chest; these barbarians feasted on them inhumanly, drinking their warm blood which they drew from its source with a sacrilegious hand. While still full of life, pieces of their thighs, calves, and arms were removed by the butchers who roasted them on coals and ate them in their sight."

Garnier. He was born in Paris in 1605 and joined the Society of Jesus at 19; in 1636 he arrived in Canada, where he was assigned to the Huron mission. After devoting himself to it for 13 years, he was sent to St. Jean in 1649, when Fort St. Marie was abandoned. During an Iroquois attack on St. Jean, Garnier exhorted his faithful to flee but to keep the faith. He remained at his post and was first struck down by two bullets. Then, according to the Relation, "The Father received shortly thereafter two axe strokes on both temples which penetrated the brain." He died on Dec. 7, 1649.

Chabanel. He was born at Saugues in southern France, Feb. 7, 1613, entered the novitiate in 1630, and arrived in Canada in 1643. By education and temperament, this brilliant professor of rhetoric in France was far removed from the native ways of living and acting, and he had no aptitude for the Huron language; but in order to protect his missionary vocation, he made the vow of stability, with his superiors' permission. After serving with Garnier at St. Jean (with the Petuns?), he was on his way to Fort St. Marie II (Christian Island) when he was killed by an apostate Huron near the Nottawasaga River in Ontario, Dec. 8, 1649. He had expressed the desire to be a martyrem in umbra, a martyr in obscurity, unknown and forgotten. His death at first appeared to be shrouded in mystery, but in the Relation of 1650, Rev. Paul Ragueneau wrote: "We learned from very reliable testimony that Father Noël Chabanel was put to death by the apostate Huron whom we suspected. He himself admitted it and added that he had committed the murder in hatred of the faith, because he saw, in his words, all the evils befalling him and his family since he had embraced the faith."

Cult of the Martyrs. In Canada the belief that these missionaries were martyrs in the strict sense of the word led Rageneau, Jesuit superior at Quebec, to set up a dossier on the subject. This Manuscript, or Mémoire, of 1652, the original of which is kept at the College of St. Marie in Montreal, contains the text of the Relations and the deposition of trustworthy witnesses on the lives and circumstances of death of the martyrs. They were equally known and venerated in Europe, where the Relations, des Jésuites (1648–49), telling of the death of Brébeuf and Lalemant, was translated into Latin and Flemish. The Relazione of Rev. Francesco Bressani (Florence 1653) made them known in Italy, but events such as the society's suppression in 1773, the French Revolution in 1789, and the political changes of the times, in both Canada and the U.S., contributed to the martyrs' oblivion. Eventually, however, the cult of the martyrs, who had always had their devotees in American lands, was revived as a consequence of the Jesuit's return to Canada in 1842; of Edmund B. O'Callaghan's discovery of the Relations, a subsequent edition of which was published by the Canadian government in 1858 and later by R. G. Thwaites; and of the historical research of Felix Martin, John Gilmary Shea, Francis Parkman, and others. In 1912, following requests to the Holy See by the hierarchies of Canada and the U.S., the martyrs' cause was introduced; beatification followed in 1925 and canonization in 1930. Annually thousands of pilgrims visit the two sanctuaries erected in their honor: at Auriesville, the Ossernenon of old, where Goupil, Jogues, and la Lande are venerated; and at Midland, Ontario, near the site of old Fort St. Marie of the Hurons, commemorating Daniel, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, and Chabanel.

Feast: Sept. 26.

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