Saints Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and Companions

The eight martyrs of New France were six French Jesuit priests, a Jesuit brother and a lay helper, all born in France and killed between 1642 and 1649 in the missions among the Huron (Wendat) and the Mohawk. Jean de Brébeuf was born on March 25, 1593, at Condé-sur-Vire in Normandy, Isaac Jogues on January 10, 1607, at Orléans, and Noël Chabanel in 1613 at Saugues in the Haute-Loire. Antoine Daniel and Jean de La Lande came from Dieppe, and Charles Garnier and Gabriel Lalemant from Paris. René Goupil, a surgeon, was baptized at Saint-Martin-du-Bois in Anjou on May 15, 1608.

Brébeuf entered the Society of Jesus in 1617, was ordained in 1622 and landed at Quebec on June 19, 1625. He spent most of the rest of his life among the Huron near Georgian Bay, and he wrote a grammar of their language and a translation of the catechism into Wendat. Jogues, a pupil of the Jesuit college of Orléans, entered the novitiate at Rouen in October 1624, was ordained in the chapel of the Collège de Clermont in Paris early in 1636, said his first Mass at Orléans and reached the Huron country on September 11, 1636.

In August 1642 Jogues, Goupil, the layman Guillaume Couture and their Huron companions were ambushed by Iroquois warriors and taken to the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, near today’s Auriesville, New York. Goupil, who had made his vows as a Jesuit before Jogues, was killed there on September 29, 1642, after he made the sign of the cross over a child. Jogues escaped with Dutch help in 1643 and landed in Brittany on Christmas Day. Queen Anne of Austria received him, and Pope Urban VIII allowed him to say Mass with his mutilated hands. He returned to Canada in 1644, and in 1646, sent to the Mohawk as an envoy of peace, he was killed at Ossernenon by a hatchet blow on October 18; Jean de La Lande was killed the next day.

Iroquois attacks then destroyed the Huron missions. Antoine Daniel was shot on July 4, 1648, at the mission of Saint-Joseph, and his body was burned in his chapel. On March 16, 1649, Brébeuf died at the stake at Saint-Ignace after hours of torture, and Gabriel Lalemant died there the next morning. Charles Garnier was killed on December 7, 1649, at the mission of Saint-Jean, near today’s Collingwood, Ontario. Noël Chabanel, who had vowed never to leave the mission except under obedience, was killed by an apostate Huron near the Nottawasaga River on December 8, 1649.

Pope Pius XI beatified the eight on June 21, 1925, and canonized them on June 29, 1930. In 1940 Pope Pius XII named them secondary patrons of Canada, after Saint Joseph. Their memorial falls on October 19 in the General Roman Calendar and in the United States, and on September 26 in Canada. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907, the head of Brébeuf was then kept as a relic by the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec.

Their two great shrines are in North America. The Martyrs’ Shrine at Midland, Ontario, the national shrine to the Canadian Martyrs, stands near the site of the mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine at Auriesville, New York, opened in 1885 on the site of Ossernenon, where Saint Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656; it has been owned since 2017 by a nonprofit chaired by the bishop of Albany, and on January 27, 2025, the United States bishops confirmed its title of national shrine.

Their images are found above all in North America, at the shrines of Midland and Auriesville and in the churches named for them, among them the parishes of the Saints-Martyrs-Canadiens in Montreal, Quebec City and Trois-Rivières. Jogues is often shown with the mutilated hands for which he needed the pope’s permission to say Mass.

Secondary patrons of Canada, named by Pope Pius XII in 1940.

• Condé-sur-VireThe town in the Manche, in Normandy, where Jean de Brébeuf was born on March 25, 1593.
• OrléansThe city where Isaac Jogues was born on January 10, 1607, studied at the Jesuit college and said his first Mass in 1636.
• DieppeThe Norman port that was the home of Antoine Daniel and Jean de La Lande.
• SauguesThe town in the Haute-Loire where Noël Chabanel was born in 1613.
• Saint-Martin-du-BoisThe village in Anjou where René Goupil was baptized on May 15, 1608.

On our ways: Orléans.