Sts. John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, and Companions

Biography

The North American Martyrs are eight French missionaries who served among the Huron (Wendat) and neighboring peoples in the seventeenth century: the Jesuit priests St. John de Brébeuf, St. Isaac Jogues, St. Anthony Daniel, St. Gabriel Lalemant, St. Charles Garnier, and St. Noël Chabanel, and the lay missionaries St. René Goupil and St. John de Lalande. They learned native languages, shared the hardships of village life, and worked amid disease and war between the Huron and the Iroquois Confederacy. Brébeuf, the mission's great pioneer, wrote a Huron grammar and spent some twenty years among the Wendat. Jogues was captured by the Mohawks in 1642 and tortured, losing parts of his fingers; Goupil was killed that year at Ossernenon, near present-day Auriesville, New York. Jogues escaped to France but chose to return, and he and Lalande were killed at Ossernenon in October 1646. Daniel died in 1648 during an attack on his mission, and Brébeuf and Lalemant were tortured to death in March 1649; Garnier and Chabanel were killed later that year. Three of them died in what is now New York State, the rest in Ontario. Pope Pius XI canonized all eight in 1930. Ten years after Jogues's death, St. Kateri Tekakwitha was born at Ossernenon.

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