For his first three years among the Wendat, Jean de Brébeuf had almost nothing to show for his work. He had crossed an ocean and then paddled and portaged eight hundred miles inland, past rapids and swarms of mosquitoes, to a country whose language he could barely speak. By the account of the one who knows him best, his preaching met with apparently no success. Then the English captured Quebec, and he was sent home to France. When he finally came back, plague swept through the villages and the Wendat council voted to kill him.
If you have ever poured years into something that seemed to go nowhere, Brébeuf is your saint. If you have been blamed for a disaster you did not cause, he is for you. If you have worked hard to understand people very different from yourself, to learn their language, their customs and their grief, and still felt like a stranger, he has been there.
He was a big man, a former college steward who knew how to manage supplies and keep accounts, and he turned out to be the founder of one of the great missions of the Church in North America. The Wendat called him Échon. By the end he had a dictionary, a grammar, a catechism, a Christmas carol and thousands of baptized Wendat to his name, and his own body had been tortured for hours without a sound of surrender. He is the saint of faithful work that takes decades to bear fruit, and of the long obedience that finally costs everything.
A Norman Born in a Country at War With Itself
Jean de Brébeuf was born on March 25, 1593, at Condé-sur-Vire in Lower Normandy. We know almost nothing of his immediate family. Tradition says his ancestors included companions-in-arms of William the Conqueror and of Saint Louis, and a poet and a prior were later counted among his nephews. Beyond that, the record is silent about the people who raised him.
The world he was born into was exhausted. France had been torn apart for decades by civil war between Catholics and Protestants, and in the year of his birth the Protestant king Henry of Navarre was on the point of converting to Catholicism in order to rule. Normandy had seen its share of the fighting. A boy growing up there learned early that faith could be a matter of life and death, and that a country could break itself over it.
The Steward Who Wanted Canada
Brébeuf did not rush into religious life. He was twenty-four when he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Rouen in 1617, which was late. After two years of formation he was put to teaching, first the youngest boys at the college in Rouen, then the second form. During his second year of teaching he fell ill, but recovered enough to prepare for the priesthood, and he was ordained in 1622 at Pontoise.
Then came the work that does not make a saint's reputation. From 1622 to 1625, Brébeuf was the steward of the college at Rouen. He kept the household running: food, supplies, repairs, money. It is hard to imagine a less romantic job. It is also exactly the kind of training that would later let him organize a mission in the wilderness.
Those who knew him would say he combined two things that rarely go together: a realist who loved tradition, order and ordinary tasks, and an ardent apostle who longed for the hardest posts. The steward and the missionary were the same man.
In 1625, the Jesuit provincial chose him for the missions in New France. He sailed from Dieppe in April and landed at Quebec in June, with a few other Jesuits and two lay brothers.
Three Years Without a Convert
His apprenticeship began in the cold. From late October 1625 to the end of March 1626, Brébeuf lived with a band of Montagnais people near Quebec, wandering with them through snow and bitter cold, learning the rudiments of their language and the shape of their life. It was five months of hardship before he had even started his real work.
In July 1626 he and a companion set out for the country of the Wendat, the people the French called Hurons. The route ran by canoe up the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa River, across Lake Nipissing, down the French River to Georgian Bay. It took twenty to thirty days, with endless portages, tramping through forests, clouds of mosquitoes, short supplies and the grim conditions of the journey itself. Brébeuf wrote about it later in pages that make him one of the great chroniclers of that route.
The Wendat were a settled, agricultural people who lived in large, palisaded villages and were organized into four great groupings: Bear, Cord, Rock and Deer. They were skilled traders who controlled the exchange of corn, tobacco and furs across a huge area, and they were allies of the French. That alliance would turn out to be a mixed blessing. It brought the French into the Wendat country and the missionaries into the Wendat homes. It also bound the French to support the Wendat against their old enemies, the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy), which would one day cost everyone dearly.
Brébeuf settled among the Bear people. During three years, he learned their language and their way of life, and as far as anyone could see, his preaching achieved nothing.
In 1629, he was hurriedly recalled to Quebec. In July, English raiders under the Kirke brothers captured the town, and the missionaries were sent back to France. Brébeuf spent the next years as a preacher and confessor in Rouen, and in January 1630 he took his final vows as a Jesuit. In 1631 he made a private promise to serve Christ even to the sacrifice of his life. He returned to New France in 1633, and in 1634 went back into Wendat country.
The Winter the Council Voted for Their Deaths
This time he had a mission to build. His superior told him to found it, and he settled at the village of Ihonatiria in September 1634.
Then the diseases came. Smallpox and dysentery in 1634, a severe influenza in 1636, smallpox again in 1639. The Europeans carried viruses that the Wendat had never encountered, and the Wendat had no defense. In a few years a population that Brébeuf and others had estimated at about thirty thousand fell to about twelve thousand. No one understood what was killing them, and the Jesuits did not understand it either.
The Wendat noticed something simpler: wherever the black-robed strangers went, people died. In the epidemic of 1636–37, the whole nation turned against the missionaries. Healers and leaders led a campaign that moved from whispers to open threats to attempts at murder. In the autumn of 1637, the Wendat grand council decided that the priests should die.
The Jesuits gathered at the village of Ossossanë for a farewell feast, in the Wendat style of a man's last meal, and Brébeuf wrote a letter that all the priests present signed. It was a testament, a last message to their superior in case they were all massacred. The epidemic ended before the sentence was carried out, but the mission came within a breath of collapse.
It was in these years that Brébeuf learned what the work would cost.
The Vow and the Language
Brébeuf's inner life was moving on a parallel track, and it is one of the most remarkable things about him.
His private spiritual diary, of which forty-four fragments survive, shows a man who had long been practicing deep prayer and had experienced communications that he treats with great reserve. His reading shaped him: the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Imitation of Christ, the letters of Saint Paul. Three commitments mark the stages of his journey. In 1631, the promise to serve Christ even at the cost of his life. Between 1637 and 1639, a vow never to refuse the grace of martyrdom if God offered it. In 1645, a vow to strive for perfection.
It matters that the second vow came in the very years the council voted for his death. A man who vows not to refuse martyrdom in an hour of safety is making a gesture. A man who vows it while the threats are real is making a decision.
Along with this ran a quieter, more laborious devotion: the language. Brébeuf had been chosen for the Wendat mission in the first place because of his gift for languages. After his first three-year stay, he knew enough to translate a Spanish Jesuit's catechism into Wendat. When he returned in 1634, he taught the language to the newly arrived priests, and together the Jesuit team compiled a dictionary and prepared a grammar. By 1639 the language was mastered. It had been eight or nine years of austere, patient work, and most of it was Brébeuf's.
He did not treat the language as a tool for getting what he wanted. The Wendat were a nation with a social, political and religious life he came to know better than any other European of his time. His detailed account of their customs, including the great Feast of the Dead, is one of the most valuable records of Wendat life before the epidemics and wars broke it apart.
What He Built
By 1638, Brébeuf had founded the mission's first residences: Saint-Joseph I at Ihonatiria in 1634, the Immaculate Conception at Ossossanë in 1637, and Saint-Joseph II at Teanaostaiaë in 1638, among the Bear and Cord peoples. In August 1638 he handed the leadership of the mission to a new superior, Jérôme Lalemant, who set up a central residence at Sainte-Marie, built under the direction of Isaac Jogues.
The conversions came slowly. The first adult in good health was baptized in 1637. A Wendat man named Chihwatenha, baptized Joseph in August of that year, became a pillar of the community, and his whole family followed him in 1638. But as late as 1641 there were still only about sixty Christians. Then, near the end of Brébeuf's life, the pace changed. In the single year 1649–50, three thousand baptisms were recorded.
The Wendat had their own reasons for listening and for refusing. Some saw something new in the Gospel. Others saw a threat to the customs that held their world together. Historians have long argued that the new faith, coming at the worst possible time, divided families and villages even as it gave comfort to many. A faithful account should not hide that.
Brébeuf also wrote. He wrote instructions for the priests who would follow him, a kind of field guide to the mission. It is practical, humane and good-humored. It tells newcomers how to behave in the canoes: don't be a burden, be ready to paddle and carry, keep your complaints to yourself. And it tells them to cultivate sincere affection for the Wendat, looking on them as people ransomed by the blood of the Son of God.
Tradition also credits him with the Huron Carol, a Christmas hymn written in the Wendat language around 1643. It is generally regarded as the oldest Canadian Christmas carol, and it adapted the story of the nativity into images drawn from the Wendat world. The English words most people sing today are a much later, freer retelling.
The Slow Closing of the Circle
The next years were harder.
In 1639–40, at Saint-Joseph II, Brébeuf endured the harshest persecution of his career. After a smallpox epidemic, the events of 1637 were repeated, only worse. Crosses were torn down. Stones were thrown at the chapel. There were beatings, and threats with hatchets and burning embers. He saw part of his flock desert the faith they had just embraced. In April 1640, an uprising broke out, and Brébeuf and a fellow priest were beaten.
In the autumn of 1640, he and a companion set out for the Neutral nation to the south. They found a country already warned against them. Wendat agents had gone ahead, portraying the missionaries as the most dangerous of sorcerers. For five months, from November 1640 to March 1641, the priests were rejected, abused and insulted everywhere they went. On the way back, Brébeuf slipped on the ice crossing a frozen lake and broke his collarbone.
His superior sent him down to Quebec for treatment, and gave him a different job. As the mission's procurator, he organized supplies and convoys for the priests in the Wendat country. It was the same kind of work he had done as a steward in Rouen. It was also a painful trial. Twice, in 1642 and 1643, the convoys he prepared were seized by the Haudenosaunee and lost.
He returned to the Wendat country for good on September 7, 1644, just as the final catastrophe was starting. The Mohawk had gained access to Dutch firearms, and in a few years went from thirty-nine muskets to three hundred. They were also under economic pressure, and saw the Wendat convoys as a prize. Beginning in 1642, they attacked the trade routes, and eventually the Wendat villages themselves. In July 1648, a war party struck the villages of Saint-Joseph and Saint-Michel while the men were away trading, and took seven hundred prisoners. One of the missionaries, Antoine Daniel, was killed.
Brébeuf stayed. By then he was in his mid-fifties, and he knew what was coming.
March 16, 1649
On March 16, 1649, more than a thousand Haudenosaunee warriors attacked the village of Saint-Ignace, and then Saint-Louis, where Brébeuf and a younger priest, Gabriel Lalemant, were working. The Wendat of Saint-Louis were overwhelmed. The two priests had the chance to flee and chose to stay with the Christian Wendat. They were taken prisoner and marched back to Saint-Ignace.
What was done to Brébeuf there is among the cruelest scenes in the history of the Church. We know it because a lay assistant of the Jesuits, Christophe Regnault, later recovered the body and described what he saw. The skin and flesh were stripped from his legs, thighs and arms to the bone. Great blisters covered his body where boiling water had been poured over him, a mockery of baptism. His body bore the burns of a belt of bark full of pitch and resin that had been set on fire, and of a collar of red-hot hatchets laid on his shoulders and chest. His lips had been cut off because he kept speaking of God while they tormented him. He had been struck more than two hundred times with sticks, and scalped. Finally, his chest had been opened and his heart torn out.
Accounts add that some of the warriors drank his blood and ate his heart, believing they could absorb the courage of a man who had suffered so much without giving in. Whatever one makes of that, the fact stands that the attackers themselves saw in him something remarkable. He lasted about three hours.
Gabriel Lalemant, a younger man in frail health who had been in the country less than six months, suffered for about seventeen hours and died on the morning of March 17.
Brébeuf was fifty-five years old. He had labored among the Wendat for fifteen years.
No set of final words has been recorded with certainty. What has been recorded is the persistence: a man who kept preaching to the end, to the point that his tormentors had to silence him with a knife.
The Others: Six Men Who Were Not Famous
The Church honors Brébeuf together with seven companions. They were not a team. They died in different places over seven years, and most never met all the others. But they belong together.
René Goupil (died September 29, 1642). A surgeon and lay helper to the Jesuits, he was captured with Isaac Jogues on the St. Lawrence. On the way south he asked to be a Jesuit brother and made his vows. A few weeks later, at Ossernenon, a Mohawk saw him make the sign of the cross over a child, and he was killed with blows from a tomahawk. He was thirty-five. He is the youngest of the martyrs and the first to die.
Isaac Jogues (died October 18, 1646). A Jesuit scholar, he escaped Mohawk captivity with mutilated hands, was received in France as a living martyr, and went back as an ambassador of peace. He was killed at Ossernenon. His life has its own full account in this series.
Jean de La Lande (died October 19, 1646). A young layman from Dieppe who volunteered to serve the Jesuits, he went with Jogues on the last journey and was killed the day after him.
Antoine Daniel (died July 4, 1648). Born at Dieppe in 1601, he worked among the Wendat and is remembered for his love of teaching the young and for making a musical setting of the Our Father. On July 4, 1648, the Haudenosaunee attacked his village just as he finished celebrating Mass. He was still in his vestments. He went out to meet the attackers so that his people could have time to flee, and was shot with arrows. His body was thrown into the burning chapel.
Gabriel Lalemant (died March 17, 1649). A Parisian scholar and college administrator who had fought poor health all his life, he took a vow to give his life for the people of the mission. He arrived in Wendat country in September 1648. He was beside Brébeuf in the last six months of his own life.
Charles Garnier (died December 7, 1649). Born in Paris in 1606, he worked in the Wendat country for years and was loved by the people. In December 1649, when the village of Saint-Jean in the Tobacco nation was attacked, he was shot as he baptized children and those preparing for baptism. The Wendat of that region called him Ouracha.
Noël Chabanel (died December 8, 1649). His story is perhaps the most human of all. A brilliant teacher of rhetoric in France, Chabanel asked to go to Canada. He arrived and found that he could not stand it. The Wendat language was hard for him. And he wrote with painful honesty that he was revolted by the life and the dirt of the place. He suffered from what we would probably call depression. Many men would have asked to be recalled, and he almost certainly could have gotten his wish. Instead, in June 1647, he bound himself by a vow of perpetual stability to remain in the Wendat mission unless his superiors ordered otherwise. He described it as a new crucifixion each day.
In December 1649, one day after Garnier was killed, Chabanel was on the road to another mission when he was ambushed and killed by a Wendat who had abandoned the faith. His body was thrown into a river.
His life is a quiet rebuke to the idea that saints are the ones who feel no resistance. Chabanel felt it every day. He stayed anyway.
What Reached the Other Side of the Fire
After the death of Brébeuf and Lalemant, the Jesuits at Sainte-Marie could not hold on. In June 1649, they burned the settlement themselves and withdrew with a few hundred Wendat to an island in Lake Huron. Famine, disease and further attacks forced them off the island. In June 1650, about three hundred Wendat and the missionaries set out for Quebec. Within a year, the survivors settled near Quebec, and their descendants live in Wendake, in Quebec, to this day.
The Wendat confederacy as it had been was destroyed. Yet the faith spread in a way no one expected. The Wendat who scattered carried the Gospel with them to other nations around the Great Lakes, and to the valley of the Mohawk River. In the single year 1649–50 alone, three thousand baptisms were recorded. An ancient Christian saying holds that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. The Church does not claim that the suffering was good. It claims that God can bring life from it.
On June 21, 1925, Pope Pius XI beatified Brébeuf and the others who died between 1642 and 1649. On June 29, 1930, he canonized the eight of them together. On October 16, 1940, Pope Pius XII proclaimed them secondary patrons of Canada, with Saint Joseph remaining the primary patron. Their memorial is kept on October 19 in the Church's general calendar and September 26 in Canada.
The body. Brébeuf's remains were recovered by his fellow Jesuits. His skull is kept at the National Shrine of the Canadian Martyrs in Midland, Ontario, across from the reconstructed Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. Bones of Garnier and Lalemant are there too. They are the only three of the eight martyrs whose relics survive. The Church does not claim that any of the bodies are incorrupt.
Patronage. Brébeuf and his seven companions are patrons of Canada because their blood was shed in the country that became Canada, and because they spent themselves for the people who lived there. It is a patronage of a land and its peoples, not of a trade.
The shape of Brébeuf's life suggests other intentions. People who work for years without seeing results can ask his help. So can anyone struggling to learn an unfamiliar language and culture, and anyone who has been blamed for a catastrophe they did not cause. And those who, like Chabanel, do not feel what they wish they felt, but stay faithful anyway, will find in these men their patrons. These are fitting prayers, not formal titles.
It is also right to say what a faithful reading must keep in view. The Wendat, the Haudenosaunee and the French were caught together in a world of war, trade and epidemic. The missionaries were not outside it. They were allied with one side, and carried diseases they did not understand. They were also, by every record we have, men who cared about the people they lived among, learned their language and chose to stay when it cost them everything. The Church holds both truths. Pilgrims today include Wendat and Mohawk Catholics, and the relics of Brébeuf have traveled alongside those of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawk-Algonquin saint born in the same valley where Jogues died.
At a Glance
| Born | March 25, 1593, Condé-sur-Vire, Normandy, France |
| Died | March 16, 1649, Saint-Ignace (Wendat country, near present-day Midland, Ontario) — tortured to death by Haudenosaunee warriors |
| 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 | Skull and relics at the National Shrine of the Canadian Martyrs, Midland, Ontario; not claimed as incorrupt |
| Patron of | Canada (secondary patron, with his seven companions) |
| Known as | The Giant of the Huron Mission · Échon (his Wendat name) |
| Key writings | A Wendat dictionary and grammar (with his fellow Jesuits) · A catechism in Wendat · Accounts of Wendat life · Instructions for new missionaries · Spiritual diary · Huron Carol (traditionally attributed) |
| Foundations | The Wendat mission: Saint-Joseph I at Ihonatiria (1634) · The Immaculate Conception at Ossossanë (1637) · Saint-Joseph II at Teanaostaiaë (1638) |
| Companions | René Goupil (1642) · Isaac Jogues (1646) · Jean de La Lande (1646) · Antoine Daniel (1648) · Gabriel Lalemant (1649) · Charles Garnier (1649) · Noël Chabanel (1649) |
| Their words | "You must have sincere affection for the Hurons, looking upon them as ransomed by the blood of the Son of God." |
Prayer
O God, who sent your servants Jean de Brébeuf and his companions to carry the Gospel to the peoples of this land, and gave them strength to stay when staying cost everything, grant us patience in work that bears no visible fruit, respect for those whose ways are not our own, and faithfulness when faith is hard. Gather all nations into the peace of your Son. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saints Jean de Brébeuf and Companions, pray for us.
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