Jean de Brebeuf, born in Normandy, March 25, 1593. He mastered the Indian language and worked through all the district of Huronia. He founded Mission-outposts, converted thousands to the faith. Massive in body, strong yet gentle in character. He made a vow signed in his blood, never to refuse the offer of Martyrdom if asked to die for Christ. His visions of his future Martyrdom were fulfilled when captured March 16, 1649 and tortured for hours. He was martyred at the age of 56. Brebeuf is said to have the heart of a giant. He was known as the apostle of the Hurons. The Indians called him Echon.

Isaac Jogues, born in Orleans, January 10, 1610. He came to Canada in 1636. He set out at once for Huronia where he supplied at Mission outposts, instructing and baptizing. He was captured by the Iroquois, brutally tortured, and made a slave. He escaped to France and returned a year later in Canada. He was sent as an emissary to discuss a treaty with the Iroquois. They blamed him for the disaster of a harvest failure. He was seized at Auriesville, N.Y. and cruelly beaten. A blow from a tomahawk gave him the crown of Martyrdom on October 18, 1646, at the age of 39.

Gabriel Lalemant, born in Paris, October 10, 1610. His ambition was to labor in the Missions and he asked to be sent to the Canadian Missions. In 1646, his repeated request to be sent to New France was granted. In Canada, he arrived in Huronia in September 1648 where in words of Scriptures, he was destined to complete a long time in a short space. He was sent to assist Brebeuf with whom he was captured and tortured for seventeen hours at the stake. Gabriel Lalemant died on March 17, 1649, at the age of 39.

Anthony Daniel, born in Normandy, May 27, 1601. He turned from the lure of worldly honors and answered a strong call to the Missions of Canada. He mastered the language and dreamed of forming future catechists among the Hurons who would instruct their tribe. He encouraged the converts to meet death as Christian should when his Mission was attacked by the Iroquois. He hastily baptized all he could and went out to face the enemy. His body was pierced with arrows and bullets. The Iroquois set fire to the Chapel and threw his body into the flames. He was martyred on July 4, 1648, at the age of 48.

Charles Garnier, born in Paris, May 25, 1606. He came to Huronia and labored thirteen years among the Hurons and Petuns. He had a strong devotion to Our Lady whom he acknowledged looked after him as a youth. Gentle, innocent, fearless, he succeeded in winning many souls to God among the Petuns. He was a victim of a massacre during which he suffered a blow of an Iroquois tomahawk on December 7, 1649, at the age of 43.

Noel Chabanel, born in Saugues, February 2, 1613. Experiencing a strong desire to consecrate himself to the Canadian Missions, he arrived in Huronia in 1643. The enthusiasm of the young missionary quickly lost its glamour. Unable to learn the Indian language, feeling useless in ministry, sensitive to the surroundings, his was to be one unbroken chain of disappointments, an ordeal that he immediately called himself a bloodless Martyrdom. For two years he stood in the shadow of dead and was slain secretly by an apostate Huron on December 8, 1649 at the age of 36.

Rene Goupil, born in Anjou, May 15, 1608. He studied medicine and then offered his services to the Jesuit Missions in Canada. He arrived in 1640 and served French colonists and native converts with patience and charity. He was captured with Isaac Jogues in 1642. On the journey to Mohawk country he begged Isaac Jogues to receive his vows. A month later he was martyred for making the sign of the cross on a little Indian child. He was martyred at Auriesville, N.Y. on September 29, 1642, at the age of 34.

Jean de la Lande, born in Dieppe, date unknown. He was a young layman who offered his services to the Jesuits in New France. He accompanied Isaac Jogues to the Mohawk Mission in 1646. Knowing what he might have to suffer, he gladly offered himself as a companion to Jogues and looking to God to protect him and to be his reward if the sacrifice of his life was demanded. With Isaac Jogues he was tortured and threatened with death. He saw the martyrdom of Jogues on October 18. He himself was martyred at the hands of the Iroquois on following day at Auriesville, N.Y.

Holy Martyrs and patrons, protect this land which you have blessed by the shedding of your blood. Renew in these days our Catholic faith which you helped to establish in this new land. Bring all our fellow citizens to a knowledge and love of the truth. Make us zealous in the profession of our faith so that we may continue and perfect the work which you have begun with so much labour and suffering. Pray for our homes, our schools, our missions, for vocations, for the conversion of sinners, the return of those who have wandered from the fold, and the perseverance for all the Faithful. And foster a deeper and increasing unity among all Christians. Amen.

In the Hotel-Dieu at Quebec a very sick Protestant soldier vehemently declared to the nuns, anxious to convert him, that he would die rather than abandon the faith of his fathers. His pious nurse clandestinely dipped a relic of Jean de Brebeuf into the sufferer’s medicine, praying that the martyr would cure the soldier both in body and mind. Though the soldier’s health did not improve, he spontaneously asked to receive instructions and became a Catholic.

A second instance was considered much more striking than the first. In 1663 the venerable relics of Father Brebeuf were considered to be directly instrumental in curing a woman of demoniacal possession. Charles de Lauson de Charny, Bishop Laval’s vicar-general, testified that on August 9, 1663, a woman, suffering for two years from possession by a demon, was instantly cured when she touched some relics of Father Brebeuf.

In the years immediately following the martyrdom of Jean de Brebeuf, cures of both body and mind, attributed to his intercession, were, apparently, granted chiefly to those among whom he lived and labored. Undoubtedly, the most striking such blessing was received by the Iroquois who was considered to have been the martyr’s executioner. He was an Oneida whom the French called Cendre-Chaude, a name which might be rendered in English as “Hot Cinder.” He not only became a Christian, but an enthusiastic apostle. Through his life Hot Cinder manifested the greatest devotion and reverence for his heroic victim, Jean de Brebeuf. Hot Cinder’s greatest boast was that it fell to him to have dealt the deathblow to Father Brebeuf.

Perhaps the most accurately attested case of Jean de Brebeuf’s celestial intervention concerned Mere Marie de Saint Augustin, an Augustinian nun at the Hotel-Dieu at Quebec. Born Marie-Catherine de Simon de Longpre at Saint-Sauveur-de-Vicombte, Lower Normandy, in 1632, she joined a convent of nursing nuns at Bayeux where her older sister had preceded her. She was then only twelve years old. Her mistress of novices, considering her a rather frivolous child, thought of dismissing her, but Marie-Catherine refused to leave, saying that she would depart from Bayeux only for New France. She came to Quebec in 1648 when she was only sixteen. Despite frequent bouts of serious illness, Mere Marie was treasured at the hospital because she was a very competent nurse, a good businesswoman, and, above all, because she was a true mystic. Though she never saw Father Brebeuf in the flesh, she very seriously considered him here sole spiritual director who had been assigned here by God himself. Mere Marie frequently saw Father Brebeuf who always carried a palm, indicating that he was a martyr. When the nun died in 1668, Bishop Laval, himself a very holy man, asked Father Ragueneau to write her biography. Ragueneau published his La Vie de Mere Catherine de Saint-Augustin at Paris in 1671. The book, replete with references to Father Brebeuf, gave further impetus to his cult both in Canada and France.

In his decreee, Militantem ecclesiam, declaring the canonization of Jean de Brebeuf and his companions, Pius XI recounted the essential details of two.

Marie Robichaud, born in 1898 at Shippigan, New Brunswick, entered a congregation of nursing sisters in 1920. Five years later, in 1925, she was gravely afflicted with fibrocaseous tubercular peritonitis. Attending physicians finally declared that further treatment was useless. The afflicted nun, and her community, sought the miraculous intercession of the North American martyrs. On June 9, 1925, she was instantly and permanently cured.

Alexandrina Ruel, a healthy young lady until 1907, was stricken with severe pains in her stomach. When an operation was performed for the removal of her appendix, the organ was declared to be tubercular. Her constant state of poor health became critical in 1918 when a second operation revealed tubercular peritonitis affecting the whole abdomen. When the medical profession gave up on the case, she had recourse to the intercession of the North American martyrs. She was cured, instantly and permanently, as her physicians attested under oath.

Before the Canadian Martyrs shed their blood for the Kingdom of God, they lived a remarkable life.

Song: St. Jean de Brebeuf (1593-1649) wrote the first Christmas song in Canada, the “Huron Carol”, (CBWII, #467), or "Jesus Anaonhia".

Sports: It is also Brebeuf from whom the name “Lacrosse” is derived. Lacrosse originated in the 1400’s, but it was named by Fr. Jean de Brebeuf in 1636 as ‘la croix’ because of the resemblance of the sticks used in the game to the cross.

Literature: St. Jean de Brebeuf also compiled the first Huron-English dictionary.

Medicine: St. Rene Goupil is the patron

The Jesuit Relations and allied documents

Saint Louis : Huron Indian village and Jesuit mission site / W. Jury, UWO 1955 map. Ill.

Saints in the wilderness : the story of St. Isaac Jogues and the Jesuit adventure in the New World. Garden City NY : Doubleday, 1964 216p.

Jesuit & savage in the New France / John Hopkins Kennedy, New Haven : Yale University Press 1950 (Yale historical publication, Miscellany; 50) 206p fold map.

The Indians of North America ed by Edna Kenton from “The Jesuits relations and allied documents: travels and explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in New France 1610-1791". Ill., maps c1927 (Jesuits, letters from Mission, [N. America]).

The Jesuits Martyrs of North America, Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brebeuf…. / John J. Wynne, SJ N.Y.: Universal Knowledge Foundation. c1925 248 p. ports. Maps.

The First Martyrs of North America – the Story of the Eight Jesuit Martyrs / John A. O’Brien Notre Dame Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press 1960 c1953, 310p maps. (C: 1953 “The American Martyrs”)

Saint Among Savages : the Life of Isaac Jogues / Francis Talbot, S.J., New York : Doubleday 1961.