In the summer of 1646, a man with ruined hands walked back into the country where they had been ruined. He knew what might be waiting. When the assignment first came, he wrote that his heart seized with dread. He went anyway.
Isaac Jogues is the saint for anyone who has been hurt in a place and then been asked to return to it. He is for people who live with a permanent injury, something that changed forever what their hands or body could do. He is for the shy and the frail, who suspect that courage belongs to other people. And he is for anyone who has tried to make peace between two sides and ended up blamed by both.
He was not a natural adventurer. He was a polished, Latin-quoting scholar from a family of lawyers and apothecaries, and those who knew him described a timid, delicate man. In 1642 the Mohawk who captured him chewed his fingers down to the bone. The Pope called him a living martyr, and he was welcomed in France as a hero. Four years later he went back, and this time he did not come home.
A Notary's Town and a Boy Who Read the Mission Letters
Isaac Jogues was born on January 10, 1607, in Orléans, the fifth of nine children. His family was prosperous and respectable: notaries, lawyers, apothecaries and merchants. His mother's name was Françoise. A private tutor started his schooling at home, and he continued at the Jesuit college that had opened in Orléans just a few years earlier.
At seventeen, with his studies complete, he faced the kind of choice a boy from such a family was supposed to make. He could take over the family's business, or follow his uncles into law and public office. He chose the Jesuits, his own teachers, and in October 1624 he became the first Jesuit novice from Orléans, entering the novitiate at Rouen.
The France of his youth was a country that had just come through decades of religious civil war, and was now ruled by Louis XIII and the formidable Cardinal Richelieu. The Jesuits were its great educators, and many of them were reading, and writing, letters from the far side of the Atlantic, where French missionaries were trying to plant the Gospel in the land the French called New France. It seems likely that Jogues read those letters as a young man, and that something in him caught fire.
A Careful Scholar Who Was Afraid
Jogues was a gentleman and a humanist. He knew Latin and Greek well, wrote in a smooth, graceful style, and carried himself with the refined manners of a man raised in comfort. He studied philosophy at La Flèche, a Jesuit college with a famous missionary spirit, and then began theology at Clermont in Paris, an institution of two thousand students, where he also served as a prefect keeping order among the lay boys.
Then, for reasons that remain unclear, he asked to be released from the rest of his theological studies, though his mind could easily have handled them. It may have been impatience to get to the missions. It may have been something else. What is certain is that he was ordained a priest at the end of January 1636, and said his first Mass in Orléans on the first Sunday of Lent. His family's joy was mixed with sadness. His mother sewed him priestly vestments and a few small things for the altar, the only gifts he would take with him across the sea.
His letters to her during these months show a man who was cutting himself loose from the world without cutting himself off from love. He was detaching himself from everything, even his family, but gently and with great affection.
He sailed on April 8, 1636, in a convoy of eight ships. After months of travel by sea and then by river, he met two of his fellow Jesuits at Trois-Rivières and was shaken by the sight. Antoine Daniel and Ambroise Davost, who had been in the missions only a few years, looked emaciated and years older than they were.
Something else shook him, too. At Trois-Rivières he watched Wendat warriors torture an Iroquois prisoner. A senior missionary had already warned the new arrivals to be ready for sights like this and to stay composed. Jogues could not. His letters do not show fear, only zeal and strength of character. But a man does not forget a thing like that.
He reached the Wendat village of Ihonatiria in September 1636, after sixteen days of travel, and was given a name in the Wendat language: Ondessonk, which means bird of prey. He was the first of the newcomers to come down with the fever.
The River Reeds
The central moment of Isaac Jogues's life lasted only a few minutes, and he spent the rest of his life trying to explain it to himself.
In the summer of 1642, he joined a convoy of Wendat canoes that was heading back to Huronia after a trading trip to the French settlements. The expedition carried supplies the missionaries badly needed, and news from Europe. They also had a sick fellow Jesuit, Charles Raymbaut, who needed a hospital in Quebec. The route along the St. Lawrence was dangerous, because the Mohawk, one of the nations of the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy), watched it constantly.
About forty people traveled in twelve canoes. With Jogues went a surgeon named René Goupil, a lay helper who worked with the Jesuits for food and clothing, and a Frenchman named Guillaume Couture. Among the Wendat in the party was a famous Christian warrior named Ahatsistari. On the second day of the journey, early in August, a Mohawk war party sprang an ambush from the shoreline. There was a brief exchange of gunfire. The Wendat scattered.
Jogues was not caught. He was hiding in a stand of tall, dense reeds, well out of sight of the Mohawk, and he could have stayed there. He wrote afterward about what happened in his mind. He asked himself whether he could abandon the Frenchmen and the new Christians and those who were still being instructed, without giving them the help the Church had entrusted to him. Flight seemed horrible. He felt that his body must suffer the fire of this earth, so that these people might be spared a greater fire, and that a brief death might win them eternal life. He reached the decision, he says, without great struggle. Then he stood up, called to one of the Mohawk who was guarding the prisoners, and gave himself up.
What happened next was very bad. The Mohawk stripped the captives and beat them with clubs until some lost consciousness. They tore out their fingernails. They chewed the fingers of the priest, gnawing them to splinters, until the bones were exposed. Then the party began the long journey south, across Lake Champlain, toward the Mohawk villages.
On the way, Goupil, who had been serving as a lay assistant, asked to become a Jesuit brother. Jogues, as a priest of the Society, received his vows. A few weeks later, at the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, a woman cut off Jogues's thumb. By the end of the ordeal, the index finger on his left hand was a stub and the thumb was gone. The thumb and index finger on his right hand were disfigured.
Thirteen Months as a Slave
The Mohawk did not kill him. They gave him as a captive to a family, and for thirteen months Isaac Jogues lived as a slave in a country he did not know, in a language he did not speak well, among people who had every reason, from their own point of view, to hate the French. The Mohawk were at war with the Wendat and the French who supported them, and trade with the Dutch at Fort Orange was reshaping their world.
An old woman adopted him as a kind of servant. He was so weakened by beatings and hardship that the only job he could do was a task normally given to women: gathering firewood for the lodge. Think about this. A Latin scholar, a man of refined education, spent his days collecting sticks in the forest.
His deepest grief, he later said, was not physical. For more than a year he could not say Mass or receive Communion. He stayed with the Wendat who had been captured with him and ministered to them as best he could.
On September 29, 1642, Goupil was killed. A Mohawk had seen him make the sign of the cross over a child's forehead, and took it for a spell. Goupil was struck on the head with a tomahawk, three times, in front of Jogues. He was thirty-five years old.
In the autumn of 1643, the Mohawk took Jogues with them on a trading trip to Fort Orange, the Dutch settlement at present-day Albany. The Dutch tried to ransom him and failed. Then they gave him some advice: run. He had also learned that he was to be killed when they returned to the village. The Dutch, who were Protestants and had no great love for Catholic priests, put their own trade with the Mohawk at risk to hide him, and eventually smuggled him down the river to Manhattan and onto a ship for Europe.
He reached the coast of Brittany on Christmas Day 1643. On January 5, 1644, he knocked at the door of the Jesuit college in Rennes. His superiors did not recognize him, so changed was he by what he had been through.
The Pope's Decision and the Queen's Curiosity
France wanted to see him. Queen Anne of Austria, who was ruling as regent, insisted on meeting this man who had come back from the dead. He tried to hide from the attention and take some rest, but eventually gave in. Before the queen, Cardinal Mazarin, and the directors of the company that governed the colony, he spoke about the sufferings and needs of New France.
There was one practical problem he could not ignore. A priest must hold the consecrated host and the chalice with his thumb and forefinger, and Jogues could no longer do it. Church law did not permit a priest with such a mutilation to celebrate Mass. So his Jesuit superiors asked the Pope for a dispensation. Pope Urban VIII granted it at once, saying, in the words recorded by the Jesuits, that it would be unworthy for a martyr of Christ not to be allowed to drink Christ's blood. He considered Jogues a living martyr.
This was the greatest comfort of Jogues's return. For the first time in more than a year, he could attend Mass and receive Communion, and then he could celebrate it himself, with hands that had been broken for it.
He could have stayed in France. He was a celebrity and a hero, and his health had been wrecked. No one would have blamed him. Instead, he asked to go back. He reached Quebec in early July 1644, and eagerly sought permission to work with the Iroquois. His superiors thought it too soon and posted him instead to the new settlement of Ville-Marie, which would become Montreal.
What He Built, and What He Wrote
Jogues's life is often told as a story of suffering, but he was also a builder and a writer.
In the Wendat country, before his capture, he had helped found the missionary center that became Fort Sainte-Marie, the mission's headquarters, and was given charge of its construction. He served among the Tobacco nation with Charles Garnier. In September 1641, with Raymbaut, he traveled far to the west, to the rapids at what is now Sault Ste. Marie, and was warmly received by the Ojibwe people who lived there. The priests promised to return.
During the calmer months in Montreal, he wrote. He composed an account of his captivity and an account of Goupil's death, and what may be the earliest description of the region that would become New York. His prose was clear and graceful, and some have said he might have made a literary name. He wrote in the way he lived, with discipline and restraint. Even in grief he did not burst out. His writing makes the reader feel that he knew he was living through something that overwhelmed him but did not crush him.
Then came peace, or what looked like it. In 1645, after years of Mohawk raids, the Mohawk and French began to talk. Jogues stood at a council before the governor at Trois-Rivières on July 12, 1645, where a Mohawk orator spoke for his people. The peace was fragile and the French did not fully trust it. In 1646, the governor and the Jesuit superior asked Jogues to go to the Mohawk as an ambassador, and he agreed.
His reply to his superior tells us what the choice cost. When he opened the letter, he said, his heart seized with dread. His nature, remembering the past, trembled. But he said the Lord had calmed it and would calm it more. He said he wanted what the Lord wanted, even at the risk of a thousand lives. He could not bear the thought that a soul might be lost because of him.
In May 1646 he set out with another Frenchman, Jean Bourdon, up the Richelieu and across the lake. He became the first European to see the lake the English would later call Lake George, and named it the Lake of the Blessed Sacrament. He took with him a box containing warm clothing, the sacred vessels for Mass, and gifts. When the talks were done, he left the box with the Mohawk, intending to retrieve it when he returned in the autumn. It was a small thing, and it cost him his life.
The Box That Frightened Them
Peace did not last the summer. When Jogues finished his mission and returned to Quebec in early July, the authorities refused to let him spend the winter among the Mohawk. He went back to Montreal. In late August, he was recalled to Trois-Rivières and permitted to join a second embassy. This time, he had decided to stay for the winter.
He left on September 24, 1646, with a young layman named Jean de La Lande and a group of Wendat. At Fort Richelieu, the Wendat turned back, afraid. The two Frenchmen continued with a single Wendat companion.
Meanwhile, something had gone wrong in the Mohawk country. That summer there was an epidemic, then a drought and famine. The Mohawk had been puzzled by the box Jogues had left with them, and now they connected it with the disasters. They became convinced that the black-robed foreigner had left a spell in the village, and that it was the cause of their suffering.
This was not an irrational conclusion for people in their position. For years, wherever the missionaries went, sickness seemed to follow. The Wendat had come to the same conclusion a decade earlier. The Europeans carried diseases that the Native peoples had no defense against, and neither side understood why. The missionaries' own letters record this pattern again and again.
Jogues and La Lande were captured in the middle of October by a Mohawk party. They were stripped and beaten. The Mohawk themselves seem to have been divided about what to do with them, and the voices for killing them won out.
The Lodge at Ossernenon
On October 18, 1646, at the village of Ossernenon, Isaac Jogues was killed by a blow of a hatchet to the head. According to the accounts that survive, he had been invited into a lodge, and the blow fell as he entered. Afterward his head was cut off. His body was thrown into the river. Jean de La Lande was killed the next day, in the same way.
No last words of his have been recorded, and it would be wrong to make some up. His most honest voice on the subject is the letter he wrote before he went. He was afraid, and he was willing. He had been through what these people could do to a man's body. He knew exactly what he was walking toward, and he walked.
He was thirty-nine.
What Came After
The Church was slow and careful. Jogues was beatified on June 21, 1925, by Pope Pius XI, together with the other missionaries who were killed in New France between 1642 and 1649. Pius XI canonized the eight of them as a group on June 29, 1930. In 1940, Pope Pius XII declared them secondary patrons of Canada, with Saint Joseph remaining the primary patron. They are remembered on October 19 in the Church's general calendar and on September 26 in Canada.
A decade after Jogues died, a Mohawk girl was born at Ossernenon. Her father was Mohawk and her mother was an Algonquin Christian who had been captured and raised among the Mohawk. She grew up to be Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native North American saint, canonized in 2012. Her birth near the place where Jogues and his two lay companions died is one of the quiet providences of the story. The Mohawk who killed a missionary in 1646 belonged to the same people who, a few years later, produced a saint.
A shrine at Auriesville, in upstate New York, honors Jogues, Goupil and La Lande, and Kateri as well. Archaeologists have since concluded that the Mohawk village where they were killed stood at a nearby site, not at Auriesville itself. The Church does not need the exact spot to honor what happened.
Patronage. Jogues's formal patronage of Canada is shared with his companions, and it is earned by blood shed on this continent in the work of bringing the Gospel to its peoples. It is a patronage of a land, not of a trade.
Beyond that, the shape of his life suggests whom he might befriend. People who live with lasting physical injuries will recognize someone who knows what it means to lose the use of the hands. Survivors of violence and captivity can turn to a man who was beaten and enslaved, and who knew what it is to be afraid. Diplomats and peacemakers, and everyone who has stood between two sides, have a patron who died as an envoy. And those who must return to a place that hurt them can pray to the man who went back with open eyes. These are fitting prayers, not formal titles.
It is also right to say honestly what the Church says today. The missionaries lived among peoples whose lands, trade and wars were being reshaped by the arrival of Europeans, and the story of their deaths cannot be told apart from that. The Mohawk had their own grief and their own reasons. A faithful reading of Jogues's life does not require anyone to pretend otherwise. It requires only that we see clearly one man who, under real fear, chose to risk his life for people he believed God loved.
At a Glance
| Born | January 10, 1607, Orléans, France |
| Died | October 18, 1646, Ossernenon (Mohawk Valley, present-day New York) — killed by a hatchet blow to the head |
| Feast Day | October 19 (General Roman Calendar, United States); September 26 (Canada) |
| Order / Vocation | Priest of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit); missionary and martyr |
| Canonized | June 29, 1930 — Pope Pius XI |
| Beatified | June 21, 1925 — Pope Pius XI |
| Body | Not preserved; he was killed and his body thrown into the river. Honored at the shrine at Auriesville, New York. |
| Patron of | Canada (secondary patron, with his companions the North American Martyrs) |
| Known as | The Living Martyr · Ondessonk ("bird of prey," his Wendat name) |
| Key writings | Account of his captivity; account of the death of René Goupil; an early description of New York |
| Foundations | Helped establish Fort Sainte-Marie among the Wendat; first mission contact with the Ojibwe at Sault Ste. Marie |
| Companions in martyrdom | René Goupil (1642) · Jean de La Lande (1646) |
| Their words | "My confidence is placed in God, who does not need our help in accomplishing his designs." |
Prayer
O God, who gave your servant Isaac Jogues the courage to stand up from his hiding place and give himself for others, strengthen all who are afraid, all who live with wounds that will not heal, and all who are sent back to hard places. Make us peacemakers between divided peoples, and give us hands that are open even when they have been hurt. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Isaac Jogues, pray for us.
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