The enduring witness of the 17th-century Jesuit martyrs transcends the fleeting political conflicts of their time and offers a great lesson to contemporary Catholics facing the evangelistic challenge of today.
“Instead of being a great theologian as you can be in France, you must expect to be here a humble scholar, and then, good God! with what teachers, exposed to the laughter of all the savages. The Huron language will be your Saint Thomas and your Aristotle. However free and easy you may be, you must make up your mind for a long time to be mute among the barbarians.” – Saint Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649)
On October 19, we celebrate the feast of the North American martyrs: Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and their companions. The Church honors these 17th-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 spanned what would later become the border between Canada and the United States.
As a Catholic attending parish schools in northern New York State, on the shores of Lake Ontario, I learned of the horrible tortures and cannibalism these martyrs were subjected to by the Iroquois, the indigenous peoples of the New York State region and sworn enemies of the Hurons.
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 Protestant English and Dutch against Catholic French. The enduring witness of these Jesuit martyrs transcends the fleeting political conflicts of the time; however, it has also sometimes obscured another aspect of the Jesuit missionary experience: engagement with Huron culture.
As the quote from Jean de Brébeuf above indicates, the zeal of the Jesuit missionaries first ran up against what seemed an almost insurmountable cultural barrier: the Huron language. Saint Brébeuf found that the sophisticated philosophical and theological training that was the hallmark of Jesuit education was of little use in a missionary context that required extraordinary effort to communicate, even on the most basic matters of daily life.
Mastery of the language, at best, prepared the Jesuits to face the additional obstacle of the cultural gap between the materially primitive pagan peoples of the New World and the materially developed Christian people of France.
To borrow the metaphors of a contemporary son of Saint Ignatius, Pope Francis, Brébeuf, university-trained, saw New France as a “field hospital” rather than a lecture hall; he saw that he and his Jesuit companions had to be “shepherds who smell like the sheep,” living with the natives and understanding their lives on a personal level.
Few are called to the red martyrdom endured by Brébeuf and his companions. All are called to evangelize. In an era when Catholics face a contemporary culture as pagan and as hostile as that of some of the indigenous peoples of the New World, this Jesuit model of cultural engagement is perhaps even more relevant than their model of heroic martyrdom.
The great era of Jesuit martyrdom took place in the 1640s, about a decade after the first serious and sustained missionary efforts began in New France. By that time, more than a hundred years had passed since Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), the “Columbus of France,” first explored the St. Lawrence River and the sites that would become the cities of Montreal and Quebec. Wars and the Reformation hindered French kings in their efforts to replicate the success of the Spanish monarchs in the New World.
From the 1520s to the 1550s, the Valois monarchs of France waged war against their Catholic rival, the Habsburgs, who, in the person of Charles V, ruled the Holy Roman Empire to the east and Spain to the southwest. No sooner were these wars over than France nearly collapsed after nearly thirty years of civil wars caused both by conflict between nobles and a monarchy aspiring to absolutism and by 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 restore stability to the kingdom, although he did so by forcing nobles and the Church to submit to royal authority. Richelieu saw the Church as an essential tool for consolidating royal power over the nobles; the Jesuit missionaries were unexpected beneficiaries of this strategy.
He knew that the wealth of the New World was key to France's advancement and he found in the fur trade the closest equivalent to Spanish gold offered by the forests of northern New France. Richelieu believed that missionaries would help establish the good relations with the Natives essential to the fur trade.
At a time when Protestants still enjoyed official tolerance, he wanted to ensure that Catholics controlled these missionary efforts. He found in the Jesuits the most dynamic and effective 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 building the French empire, but considered the evangelization of the natives their first priority. Richelieu, preoccupied with the Thirty Years' War and the consolidation of Bourbon absolute monarchy, gave them astonishing freedom of action. Historian W. J. Eccles went so far as to judge them “practical masters of Canada” during their golden age of the 1630s and 1640s.
These Jesuit “masters” used their power on the model of Christ, humbling themselves to serve others and save souls. Life on the frontier was an often humiliating experience for these cultured, cosmopolitan Frenchmen trying to survive in an unknown land, at the other end of the world, far from the comforts of civilization. Sharing the faith meant living with the natives, who in turn lived as they did.
Paul Le Jeune, Jesuit superior of New France from 1632 to 1639, wrote about his experiences accompanying the Montagnais, nomadic hunters who roamed the northern forests west of Quebec City. Le Jeune was clearly not up to the rigors of the northern winter; he depended entirely on his native hosts for his survival. The Montagnais often commented, sometimes mockingly, on his relative weakness; nevertheless, 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 with the Montagnais. The Jesuits judged that the Montagnais' nomadic lifestyle, more than the northern winters or even language barriers, was the main obstacle to evangelization. In this, their experience replicates that of the Franciscans in the much warmer climate of Mexico and the American Southwest. Time and again, Catholic missionaries in the New World insisted that true conversion and proper catechesis could only take place in the context of established farming communities.
With this bias, the Jesuits placed their greatest hopes in evangelizing the most sedentary and agricultural of Canada's indigenous peoples, the Hurons. The mission in Huronia lies at the center of the golden age of evangelization in New France. This age extends 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 claimed the lives of many Jesuit companions of the Huron.
Having found a sedentary agricultural people open to evangelization, the Jesuits quickly encountered the next cultural obstacle: language. Saint Brébeuf encountered linguistic difficulties in teaching the simplest of Catholic prayers, the sign of the cross. Asking for advice from a Jesuit superior, Brébeuf writes:
“A relative noun with them always includes the sense 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.’
We find it impossible to make them say correctly, in their language, In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Would you judge it good, pending a better expression, to replace it with: In the name of our Father, and of his Son, and of their Holy Spirit? It certainly seems that the three Persons of the most holy Trinity would be sufficiently expressed in this way… … Would we risk using it thus until the Huron language is enriched, or the minds of the Hurons are opened to other languages? We will do nothing without advice.”
The exact relationship of the three persons of the Trinity had been an occasion for heresy and schism in the earlier history of the Church. For Brébeuf, it is clear that this is not a small matter of semantics. Nevertheless, recognizing the current limits of translation and trusting in God's mercy and patience, he is willing to experiment with a potentially misleading linguistic construction in order to begin guiding the Hurons toward the full truth of the Trinity.
Brebœuf's cultural bridge-building extended far beyond grammar. Like many of his Jesuit contemporaries, Brébeuf repeatedly emphasized the natural virtue of the indigenous peoples he encountered. Compared both to the rough Frenchman who did the dirty work of empire expansion and to the effeminate, over-refined nobles of the French court, the Hurons seemed to Brébeuf 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. More surprisingly, Brébeuf saw truth and beauty in some of the Hurons' pagan religious rituals, notably the Feast of the Dead. Brébeuf's account is almost as horrifying as some of the later accounts of the Jesuit martyrs at the hands of the Iroquois.
The Hurons not only honored their dead with prayers, songs, and dances, they exhumed their decaying corpses, kissed them, and clothed them in the finest new beaver robes. Even accounting for the Jesuits' fairly generous cultural triage process, one could easily imagine Brébeuf judging this practice as chaff rather than wheat. This is not the case:
“I attended this spectacle and gladly invited all our servants, for I do not believe that one can see in the world a more vivid image or a more perfect representation of what man is. It is true that in France our cemeteries preach a powerful message and that all these bones piled one on top of the other without discrimination, those of the poor with those of the rich, those of the commoners with those of the great, are so many voices that constantly announce to us the thought of death, the vanity of the things of this world, the contempt of earthly life.
Yet it seems to me that what our Indians do on this occasion touches us even more and makes us see more closely and apprehend more vividly our miserable state. For, having opened the graves, they expose before you all these corpses, and they leave them thus exposed in the public square long enough for the spectators to learn, once and for all, what they will one day be.”
Brebœuf then praises the Hurons for the exceptional charity they show towards the bodies of their ancestors, braving worms, oozing corruption and “an almost intolerable stench” to adorn the dead with their fresh robes. Again, he draws a comparison and issues a challenge to French Christians: if these pagans can act thus, “who would fear the stench of a hospital, and who would not take a particular pleasure in being at the feet of a sick person all covered with ulcers, in whose person he sees the Son of God?”
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There seems to be a great lesson here for contemporary Catholics facing the evangelistic challenge of a post-Christian secular culture. It is tempting, as Brébeuf saw in his time, to prefer the safety and comfort of Saint Thomas and Aristotle to the hard work of finding evangelistic points of convergence with contemporary culture.
Yet, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI once said to 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.
This article was originally published in English by Catholic World Report (Article link). It is republished and translated with the author's permission.