Sts. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and Companions

Who they were

Eight Jesuits of the French mission to the Huron country, six priests and two lay volunteers, were killed between 1642 and 1649 amid the wars devastating the region. Rene Goupil, a lay surgeon, died first, tomahawked for making the sign of the cross over a child. Isaac Jogues was captured and mutilated, escaped to France a celebrity, and went back twice, dying at Ossernenon in 1646. Jean de Brebeuf spent twenty four years with the Huron, mastered the language, wrote its first dictionary and the Huron Carol still sung at Christmas, and died in 1649.

Their own writings resist the reading that makes them agents of empire. Brebeuf's instructions to new missionaries are a manual of cultural respect centuries ahead of schedule, beginning from the premise that you must love these people as brothers. What they were is men who chose to belong to a people and then accepted that people's worst decade as their own. One detail carries the epilogue: ten years after Jogues died at Ossernenon, St. Kateri Tekakwitha was born in that same village.

Why people turn to Sts. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and Companions

Missionaries, and everyone working across a cultural line they chose: teachers, medics, adoptive families. Their shrine at Auriesville stands on the ground itself.

How to ask their intercession

Brebeuf's own petition, to love the people more than the results, is the prayer.