The North American Martyrs and our post-Christian secular culture

“Instead of being a great theologian as you may be in France, you must reckon on being here a humble scholar, and then good God! with what masters—exposed to the laughter of all the savages. The Huron language will be your St. Thomas and your Aristotle. Glib as you are, you must decide for a long time to be mute among the barbarians.” — St. John de Brébeuf, SJ (1593-1649)

On October 19th, we celebrate the feast of the North American Martyrs: Isaac Jogues, S.J., John de Brébeuf, S.J. and their companions. The Church honors these seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries primarily for their heroic martyrdom in the service of spreading the Gospel. These Jesuits worked among the Huron Indians in the Great Lakes region and their missionary work crossed what would later be the border between Canada and the United States.

As a Catholic attending parochial schools in upstate New York, on the shores of Lake Ontario, I learned of the gruesome tortures and cannibalism to which these martyrs were subjected by the Iroquois, the native peoples of the New York state region and sworn enemies of the Huron. As a student of American history, I later learned that the Jesuits, Hurons and Iroquois were all caught up in a larger war for New World empire, pitting the Protestant English and Dutch versus the Catholic French. The enduring witness of these Jesuit martyrs transcends fleeting political conflicts of the era; however, it has also at times obscured another aspect of the Jesuit missionary experience, the engagement with Huron culture.

As the above quote from Jean de Brébeuf indicates, Jesuit missionary zeal confronted first what seemed a near impassable cultural barrier, the Huron language. Brébeuf found that the sophisticated philosophical and theological training that were the hallmark of Jesuit education were of little use in a missionary setting that required extraordinary effort to communicate on even the most basic matters of daily life. Language proficiency, at best, prepared the Jesuits to face the additional hurdle of the cultural gap between the materially primitive, pagan peoples of the New World and the materially developed, Christian people of France.

To use metaphors of a contemporary son of St. Ignatius, Pope Francis, the university trained Brébeuf looked out on New France as a “field hospital” rather than a lecture hall; he saw that he and his fellow Jesuits needed to be “shepherds with the ‘smell of the sheep,’” living with the Natives and understanding their life at a personal level. Few are called to the red martyrdom endured by Brébeuf and his companions. All are called to evangelize. At a time when Catholics face a contemporary culture as pagan and as hostile as those of some of the Native peoples of the New World, that Jesuit model of cultural engagement may be even more relevant than their model of heroic martyrdom.

The great era of Jesuit martyrdom occurred during the 1640s, some ten years after the start of the first serious, sustained missionary efforts in New France. By that time, it had been over one hundred years since Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), the “Columbus of France,” first explored the St. Lawrence River and the sites that would become the cities of Montréal and Québec City. Wars and the Reformation hindered the French kings in their efforts to replicate the New World success of the Spanish monarchs.

From the 1520s to the 1550s, the Valois monarchs of France waged war against their Catholic rival the Hapsburgs, who in the person of Charles V ruled the Holy Roman Empire to the east and Spain to the southwest. No sooner did these wars come to a close than France almost collapsed from nearly thirty years of civil wars spurred both by the conflict between nobles and a monarchy aspiring to absolutism as well as the revolt of Protestant nobles against the efforts of the king and Catholic nobles to keep France a Catholic kingdom.

Ultimately, it took a churchman, Cardinal Richelieu, to bring stability to the kingdom, though he did so by forcing both nobles and the Church to submit to royal authority. Richelieu saw the Church as an essential tool for the consolidation of royal power over the nobles; the Jesuit missionaries were unexpected beneficiaries of this strategy. He knew that New World wealth was a key to the advancement of France and found in the fur trade the closest equivalent to Spanish gold afforded by the northern woods of New France. Richelieu believed that missionaries would help to establish the good relations with Natives essential to the fur trade. At a time when Protestants still enjoyed official toleration, he wanted to make sure that Catholics controlled these missionary efforts. In the Jesuits, he found the most dynamic and successful missionary order of the Catholic Reformation and entrusted them with the task of making Christians of the indigenous peoples of New France.

The Jesuits accepted their role in French empire building but understood the evangelization of Natives as their first priority. Richelieu, preoccupied with the Thirty Years’ War and the consolidation of the Bourbon absolute monarchy, gave them a surprisingly free hand. The historian W. J. Eccles has gone so far as to judge them “the practical master of Canada” during their golden age of the 1630s and 1640s. These Jesuit “masters” used their power after the model of Christ, humbling themselves to serve others and save souls. Life on the frontier was an often humiliating experience for these cultivated, cosmopolitan Frenchmen trying to survive in an unfamiliar land half a world away from the comforts of civilization. Sharing the faith meant living with Natives, which in turn living like the Natives. Paul Le Jeune, the Jesuit Superior of New France from 1632 to 1639, wrote of his experiences accompanying the Montagnais, nomadic hunters who roamed the northern woodlands west of Quebec City. Le Jeune was clearly not up to the rigors of northern winter travel; he was entirely dependent on his native hosts for his survival. The Montagnais often commented, sometimes mockingly, on his relative weakness; nonetheless, they appreciated his willingness to risk his life to accompany them and accepted his presence within their community.

Despite generally good relations, Le Jeune had only limited success among the Montagnais. The Jesuits judged the nomadic lifestyle of the Montagnais, more than the northern winters or even the barriers of language, to be the main obstacle to evangelization. In this, their experience replicated that of the Franciscans in the far warmer climate of Mexico and the American Southwest. Again and again, New World Catholic missionaries insisted that true conversion and proper catechesis could only take place within the context of settled, agricultural communities.

With this bias, the Jesuits placed their greatest hopes in the evangelization of the most settled and agricultural of the native peoples of Canada, the Huron. The mission to Huronia stands at the center of the golden age of evangelization in New France. This age stretched from 1634, when Brébeuf first established a Jesuit presence among the Hurons, to 1649, when the Iroquois effectively destroyed the Huron people through the war of extermination that took the lives of many of the Huron’s Jesuit companions.

Having found a settled agricultural people open to evangelization, the Jesuits quickly ran into the next cultural obstacle, language. Brébeuf found linguistic difficulties in teaching even the simplest of Catholic prayers, the sign of the cross. Asking advice of a Jesuit superior, Brébeuf wrote:

A relative noun with them always includes the meaning of one of the three persons of the possessive pronoun, so that they cannot say simply “father, son, master, servant,” but are obliged to say “my father, your father, his father.”¹

We find ourselves hindered from getting them to say properly in their Language, In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Ghost. Would you judge it fitting, while waiting a better expression, to substitute instead, In the name of our Father, and of his Son, and of their holy Ghost? Certainly it seems that the three Persons of the most holy Trinity would be sufficiently expressed in this way . . . Would we venture to employ it thus until the Huron language be enriched, or the mind of the Hurons opened to other languages? We will do nothing without advice.

The exact relation of the three persons of the Trinity had been an occasion of heresy and schism in the earlier history of the Church. Brébeuf clearly sees this as no small matter of semantics. Still, acknowledging the current limitations of translation and trusting in the mercy and patience of God, he is willing to experiment with a potentially misleading linguistic construct in order to begin the process of guiding the Huron to the full truth of the Trinity.

Brébeuf’s cultural bridge-building extended far beyond grammar. Like so many of his contemporary Jesuits, Brébeuf repeatedly emphasized the natural virtue of the native peoples he encountered. Compared both with the rough sort of Frenchman who did the dirty work of expanding the empire and the effete, over-refined nobles of the French court, the Hurons struck Brébeuf as the equivalent of the virtuous pagans of the ancient world: they were honest and generally free from the dominant European vices of greed and lust. Even more surprising, Brébeuf saw truth and beauty in some of the Huron’s pagan religious rituals, most notably the Huron Feast of the Dead. Brébeuf’s account is nearly as gruesome as some of the later accounts of Jesuit martyrdom at the hands of the Iroquois.

The Huron did not simply honor their dead in prayer, song and dance, but exhumed their rotting corpses, embraced them and clothed them with the finest new beaver robes. Even considering the Jesuits’ fairly generous cultural sorting process, one could easily imagine Brébeuf judging this practice as chaff rather than wheat. Not so:

I was present at this spectacle and willingly invited all our servants, for I do not think one could see in the world a more vivid picture or a more perfect representation of what man is. It is true that in France our cemeteries preach a powerful message and that all those bones piled up one upon another without discrimination—those of the poor with those of the rich, those of the mean with those of the great—are so many voices continually proclaiming to us the thought of death, the vanity of the things of this world, and contempt for earthly life. Still, it seems to me that what our Indians do on this occasion touches us still more and makes us see more closely and apprehend more vividly our wretched state. For, having opened the graves, they display before you all these corpses, and they leave them thus exposed in a public place long enough for the spectators to learn, once and for all, what they will be someday.

Brébeuf goes on to commend the Hurons for the exceptional charity they show toward the bodies of their ancestors, braving worms, oozing corruption and “an almost intolerable stench” in order to adorn the dead with their fresh coats. Here again he makes a comparison and issues a challenge to French Christians: if these pagans can do thus, “who would be afraid of the stench of a hospital, and who would not take special pleasure in finding himself at the feet of a sick man all covered with sores, in the person of whom he beholds the Son of God?”

There seems a great lesson in this for contemporary Catholics confronting the evangelical challenge of a post-Christian secular culture. It is tempting, as Brébeuf saw in his own time, to prefer the safety and comfort of St. Thomas and Aristotle to the hard work of finding points of evangelical common ground with contemporary culture.

Yet, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI once said to the Catholics of our time: “You were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.” In Jean de Brébeuf and his companions, we have an enduring model of the greatness to which all Christians are called.

(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on October 18, 2022.)

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