Feast day: October 19

Sts. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf & Companions

North American Martyrs · d. 1642–1649

Patron of North America

Eight French Jesuits martyred while bringing the Gospel to the Huron and Iroquois nations; Jogues returned to his missions even after torture and mutilation.

Isaac Jogues was a French Jesuit, born at Orléans in 1607, who in 1636 was sent as a missionary to New France — the vast wilderness of what is now Canada and the northern United States — to bring the Gospel to the native peoples. With great courage and tenderness he labored among the Hurons around the Great Lakes, sharing their hard and dangerous life far beyond the reach of European help.

In 1642, traveling with a supply party, he was captured by a war band of the Mohawks, enemies of the Hurons, and subjected to months of horrific torture — beaten, burned, and having several fingers cut or chewed off — before being held as a slave. He could have escaped earlier but stayed to comfort and baptize his fellow captives. At last Dutch traders helped him flee, and he returned to France maimed, where the pope gave him special permission to say Mass with his mutilated hands.

He could not stay away. He volunteered to return to the very people who had tortured him, going back to the Mohawk country first as a peace envoy and then as a missionary. In 1646, blamed by some in the village for a blight and an epidemic, he was seized and killed with a tomahawk at Ossernenon, in present-day New York.

He was one of eight North American Martyrs — Jesuit priests and lay helpers, among them the heroic Jean de Brébeuf — who gave their lives for the faith in those years, canonized together in 1930. Their feast is October 19, and they are honored as patrons of North America and of the Church's missions on the continent they watered with their blood.

Jogues escaped to France after losing fingers to torture — then sailed straight back. He needed papal permission to say Mass with maimed hands; the pope replied: 'It would be shameful for a martyr of Christ not to drink the blood of Christ.'

Image: Donald Guthrie McNab (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08420b.htm