Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues

St. Brébeuf landed at Quebec on June 19, 1625 AD, after sailing from Dieppe in April. He was thirty-two and still in poor health, which had broken down completely when he was twenty-eight. The ship's Calvinist captain threatened to carry him back to France, but St. Brébeuf stayed in the colony.

That winter St. Brébeuf lived for five months in the cold and snow with a roving band of Montagnais. In July 1626 AD he made his first 800-mile canoe journey to the Huron country and settled at Toanché, among the Bear tribe of the Huron. In 1629 AD he baptised his first Huron before leaving the country, and that July he was at Quebec when the English took it and sent him back to France.

On August 5, 1634 AD, St. Brébeuf returned to the Huron country after thirty days on the canoe route from Three Rivers. The Wendat called him Échon, and at Candlemas 1636 AD, with the Christian children of Ihonatiria gathered for the blessing of candles, he said a prayer in their language. That July he signed his report on the mission, which gave advice to any missionary God might call to New France.

As the epidemics spread in 1637 AD, the Huron accused the Jesuits of sorcery. A council of twenty-eight villages brought the charge, and late in October the grand council told the priests it had decided they should die. St. Brébeuf wrote a farewell letter that every Jesuit with him signed, but the eclipse of the moon on December 31, which the missionaries had predicted, restored their standing. By 1639 AD St. Brébeuf had written out a vow never to refuse the grace of martyrdom if God offered it to him.

St. Jogues, born at Orléans in 1607 AD, was ordained early in 1636 AD and sailed from Dieppe that April. He landed at Quebec on July 2, the feast of the Visitation, and said his first Mass in New France that day. He reached Ihonatiria on September 11, and the Hurons named him Ondessonk, bird of prey.

That month St. Jogues was the first missionary to fall ill with the epidemic fever, and St. Brébeuf bled him with his own hand. In September 1641 AD St. Jogues travelled west to the falls of Sault Sainte-Marie and preached to some two thousand Ojibwa and other Algonquins. In June 1642 AD the mission's superior sent St. Jogues down to Quebec in four canoes to bring back supplies.

For the journey back, St. Jogues asked to take St. René Goupil, a surgeon serving the missionaries as a layman, because the Huron badly needed a surgeon. On August 2, 1642 AD, seventy Mohawk warriors in twelve canoes ambushed their party of about forty near Lake Saint-Pierre on the St. Lawrence. Most of the Huron fled, but St. Goupil was taken, and St. Jogues gave himself up rather than leave him and the captives who were not yet baptised.

The captors beat them and tore out their nails on the shore, and at Ossernenon an old man forced a captive Christian woman to cut off St. Isaac Jogues's left thumb. On September 29, 1642 AD, at Ossernenon, a young warrior killed St. Goupil with a hatchet for making the sign of the cross over a child. St. Jogues knelt and offered his own head to the hatchet. He gave St. Goupil absolution, and two more blows killed St. Goupil.

That autumn St. Jogues was given to Mohawk hunters as a servant and marched thirty leagues on their deer hunt. Back in the villages he baptised infants and taught the Huron captives, and he refused to escape so as not to leave them. In the summer of 1643 AD, near Fort Orange, a Dutch farm labourer helped him reach a Dutch ship, and the Dutch hid him until they had paid off his captors.

The Dutch governor clothed St. Jogues at Manhattan, and he landed in Brittany on Christmas Day, 1643 AD, in time to hear Mass. Church law barred a priest with mutilated fingers from saying Mass, so St. Jogues asked Rome, and Pope Urban VIII gave him permission. St. Jogues sailed from La Rochelle in the spring of 1644 AD and was back at Quebec that summer.

In May 1646 AD St. Jogues went to the Mohawk as the governor's envoy of peace, with the governor's engineer, Jean Bourdon. He reached Ossernenon, the village of his captivity, on June 5 and was back at Quebec on July 3. In late September St. Jogues set out again with St. Jean de Lalande, a young lay helper from Dieppe who knew the danger and had promised to follow him.

A Mohawk war party took them, and at Ossernenon the two envoys of peace were treated as enemies. On the evening of October 18, members of the Mohawk Bear clan, acting on their own authority, called St. Jogues to supper and struck him with a hatchet as he entered the lodge. St. Lalande was killed the same way early the next morning, and both bodies were thrown into the river.

On July 4, 1648 AD, the Iroquois overran Teanaostaiaé as St. Antoine Daniel finished Mass, and he walked out to meet them so his people could escape. On the morning of March 16, 1649 AD, they took Saint-Louis, where St. Brébeuf and St. Gabriel Lalemant had refused to leave their people. They stripped the two priests, tore out their nails and took them to Saint-Ignace, which they had stormed at dawn.

There they scalded and burned St. Brébeuf, and he kept urging the captive Christians to look to heaven until they cut away his lips and tongue. St. Brébeuf died at about four that afternoon, and St. Lalemant died at about nine the next morning after a night of torture. On December 7, 1649 AD, St. Charles Garnier was shot and killed with a hatchet at Saint-Jean, and the next day St. Noël Chabanel was killed by a Huron who later confessed that he hated the faith.

St. Brébeuf and St. Lalemant were buried in March 1649 AD at Sainte-Marie, the Jesuits' central mission house in the Huron country. Large summer pilgrimages began in 1884 AD to Auriesville, New York, the site of Ossernenon, where St. Jogues, St. Goupil and St. Lalande were killed.

Pope Pius XI canonised St. Brébeuf, St. Jogues and their six companions together on June 29, 1930 AD. On October 16, 1940 AD, Pope Pius XII named the same eight martyrs patron saints of Canada. In 1984 AD Pope St. John Paul II, at the Martyrs' Shrine in Midland, recalled that Pope Urban VIII had made Sainte-Marie a place of pilgrimage in 1644 AD, the first of its kind in North America.