The Outrageous Courage of the North American Martyrs

We continue on the trail of our American saints as we explore the gripping tale of St. Isaac Jogues, St. René Goupil, and St. Jean de la Lande, three of the eight saints known as the North American Martyrs, who lived and died in Canada and upstate New York in the 17th century. We celebrated their feast on October 19th.

I once participated in an ice-breaker event at a young adult group that posed the question to each participant: If you could be anyone’s assistant (from any point in history), whose would you be?

I said I would be the assistant to St. Isaac Jogues and the North American Martyrs. 

I take no credit for wanting to do something heroic. I don’t think I was really thinking it through, to be honest; I do have a great and probably romanticized love for the colonial era, Native American history, and other such things that probably was the real basis for my hastily-thought-of response. That coupled with some half-formed desire to look holy in front of my peers, maybe, and the fact that I belonged to a parish called North American Martyrs.

In any case, my answer illustrated the vast chasm that exists between our idea of a thing and how it actually looked in real space and time. Life on the colonial frontier of New York and lower Canada, especially as a Catholic Jesuit missionary, was several degrees of magnitude more harrowing, uncertain, and downright brutal than any depiction of it can aspire to.

Being an assistant to such a missionary often meant meeting exactly the same fate they did: a life of fear and deprivation, horrible torture, and oftentimes, a vicious death. 

In fact, we know the story of two such assistants whose heroic stories illustrate the level of sanctity, fortitude, and utter hard-as-nails grit these people possessed.

Their names were René Goupil and Jean de la Lande, and they were the courageous companions of Isaac Jogues.

The Unstoppable Surgeon

René Goupil suffered from bad health even before his missionary endeavors. Unable to persist in the Jesuit novitiate because of it, he didn’t use that as an excuse for an easy life. He studied medicine instead and volunteered to serve as a layman at the Jesuit mission in Quebec. He spent two years working as a surgeon in Quebec hospitals and doing various kinds of work at the Jesuit house.

In the summer of 1642, Fr. Isaac Jogues arrived in Quebec. This seasoned missionary had worked among the Huron for six years and was currently stationed at the Huron mission of Sainte-Marie on Lake Superior. He had come to the Jesuit headquarters seeking additional priests and fresh supplies. 

The Quebec house couldn’t spare any priests, so René Goupil was sent back with Fr. Isaac instead.

But they never made it back to the Huron. They and their Huron companions were captured by the Mohawk (enemies of the Huron) and taken to their village of Ossernenon (now Auriesville, New York). Along the way, they suffered such gruesome tortures as having their fingernails torn out and some of their fingers cut off at the joints. 

Seeing their predicament, René asked Fr. Isaac to accept his vows as a Jesuit lay brother. Fr. Isaac received them, and the two Jesuits traveled on to Ossernenon.

More ugly tortures awaited them at their arrival at the village. René earned the crown of martyrdom on the feast of Michaelmas, when he was tomahawked after teaching a Mohawk child the Sign of the Cross. He was the first of the North American Martyrs to win his place among the saints.

René’s body was eventually deposited in the woods, where Fr. Isaac found it and buried it.

Young But Able

Fr. Isaac remained captive at the village for another year, living as a slave in horrible deprivation with inadequate food or protection from the cold. The Dutch Calvinists in the area worked assiduously for his release, and with their help he escaped back to Europe via New Amsterdam (New York City). 

Upon his arrival, the Holy Father, naming him a martyr, gave him special permission to say Mass even though his tortures had deprived him of the canonically required index fingers. 

Then, after only a few months, Fr. Isaac did the unthinkable. 

He went back.

He was a missionary to the core, and his zeal for the salvation of souls was far more powerful than any fear of torture or death. 

He worked for two more years in Quebec. While there, he was sent back to the Mohawk to help negotiate a peace treaty with them, which he accomplished successfully, arriving and leaving on good terms.

But then, in 1646, he asked permission to return as a missionary to the Mohawk, when the Huron requested his company on a trip to Ossernenon to organize treaty details.

“To the Mohawk?” we might ask. “To Ossernenon?”

While things were peaceful with the Mohawk at the time, Ossernenon was nonetheless the very same village where Fr. Isaac was tortured and his friends killed four years before. 

His superiors probably weren’t too eager to grant his wish, but they allowed him to go.

He wrote to a fellow priest before departing:

My heart tells me that if I am the one to be sent on this mission I shall go but I shall not return. But I would be glad if our Lord wished to complete the sacrifice where He began it. Farewell, dear Father. Pray that God unite me to Himself inseparably.

And if going back to the Mohawk wasn’t crazy enough, word reached Fr. Isaac and his traveling party en route that sentiment among the Mohawk had turned against them. Grave danger lay ahead. 

Any normal person would have turned back. But not Fr. Isaac. He continued on his journey, though all his companions forsook him except two—one Huron and the young layman, Jean de la Lande. 

Jean was only about 20 years old, though he was a capable and experienced frontiersman.

They were, predictably, captured by the Mohawk and taken back to Ossernenon. Though some clans wanted to free the prisoners and maintain peace with the French, members of the fierce Bear Clan took it into their own hands to kill Fr. Isaac on October 18, 1646.

Jean was martyred soon after, when he tried to sneak out of the cabin where he was being held in order to recover Fr. Isaac’s body.

Both bodies were thrown into the Mohawk River and their heads displayed on the palisades of the village.

Auriesville

In the now-peaceful Mohawk Valley of central New York state, fierce war cries and the sharp report of muskets are heard no more. The lakes and streams that once ran red with blood are still and clear now, the playplaces of local wildlife, birdwatchers, and outdoor adventurers. 

It’s difficult to picture the past conflict in what is now an unusually idyllic part of the Northeast—a swath of territory where you now might go to escape conflict, stress, and the pressures of life.

Down these less-traveled roads, you can visit a sacred place dedicated to the North American Martyrs. Its proper name is Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine, but when I was growing up in southern New York, we just called it Auriesville.

The Shrine isn’t just one building or set of buildings. It isn’t just one spot. It is an entire campus of sacred ground that has been sanctified by the blood of saints. 

Since we don’t know exactly where the remains of the martyrs lie, there are no tombs, no gilded caskets beneath high altars, no graves, no tombstones, no bones. 

The closest thing we have to an exact burial site is the ravine where Fr. Isaac buried René. Alongside this ravine, on a trail through the woods reminiscent of a Way of the Cross, you can relive the story of his martyrdom as we know it from the writings of Fr. Isaac. 

The ravine itself is considered a sacred reliquary. Indeed, it feels as though the whole place is consecrated, the very earth permeated by the scattered mortal remains of these courageous men and glowing with the vivid memory of their sacrifice.

In the Shrine basilica, four altars are arranged in a square shape in the sanctuary. They are composed of beautiful rustic logs and carved wood, evoking the hand-built chapels and altars where the first missionaries of the land offered the first Masses celebrated in this part of the world. 

Statues of the martyrs stand watch at three of the four corners of the altars, while red crosses and the Holy Name of Jesus—which these martyrs so often carved into the massive tree trunks of the wilderness—grace the pillars and doors of the building.

Another saint, whose conversion was one of the first fruits of the martyrs’ sacrifice, keeps vigil at the fourth altar corner—St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawk, who was born at Ossernenon only a few years after the deaths of St. Isaac and St. Jean. She is honored here as well as at a shrine dedicated to her a few miles away, on the other side of the river, where she lived most of her life. 

We went to Auriesville at least a couple of times when I was growing up. It was the perfect day trip for us and the other Catholic families of the Southern Tier of New York, a place full of small towns and dairy farms that rarely makes the news (and bears little resemblance to the hustle and bustle of New York City). 

Looking back now, I can see that it was kind of our shrine, that little piece of Church history that certainly didn’t belong to us, but was Providence’s gift to us. I don’t think I realized at the time what a strange and special blessing that was, especially in a vast country where the Faith is still relatively young and not every place could claim such patron saints.

Here, of all lowly places, is where some of the bravest men to walk the earth worked and lived and laid down their lives. 

Here the Faith took root and spread, bearing fruits of conversion and sanctity that would last through the generations and—along with the work of missionaries in other regions—would form the spiritual bedrock of our land.

That’s pretty special, now that I think about it. Here’s to you, Auriesville, and to the sacred secrets that you keep.

A Courage Like No Other

As modern-day Americans, it is hard for us to really, truly imagine the level of courage that people like St. Isaac Jogues, St. René Goupil, and St. Jean de la Lande displayed just by stepping off a ship onto the shores of New France. 

Today, we are no longer engaged in conflicts with other nations and tribes. We live in an established country now, with a societal framework constructed over generations and supported by a network of enforced laws for the protection of life and property. 

Our lives are marked not by fear and uncertainty, but by predictability and routine. We take our general safety and survival for granted as we go about our day-to-day lives.

We are born into this framework, and it’s hard to imagine life without it.

The first missionaries, however, were stepping into an entire world of fear, uncertainty, and deprivation. The constant threat of death and extreme suffering was a daily, lived reality for them. Safety and security were never taken for granted, whether you were on a long river trip to the next Jesuit mission or simply walking out to grab a side of bacon from the smokehouse.

The missionaries knew what they were getting into, and they went into it willingly—eagerly. And when things went awry, people like Fr. Isaac just turned around and went right back.

It was this superhuman, you’ve-got-to-be-out-of-your-mind level of courage that brought the Faith to our continent. 

These are heroes who lived out their vocations until it buried them. Here are followers of Jesus who, like Him, loved their own until the very end. 

I don’t know if I’d actually be brave enough to volunteer as one of their assistants in real life. But let us give thanks for the wild courage that—long before we even knew what the American dream was—became the stuff that our American faith was built on. +

Feature image shows a 1676 map of New York and New England. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.