Life
St. Isaac Jogues was born in Orléans, France, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1624. In 1636, he was sent to New France as a missionary to the Huron and Algonquian allies of the French. In 1642, while on his way by canoe to the country of the Hurons, Jogues was captured by a war party of Mohawk Iroquois, in the company of Guillaume Cousture, René Goupil, and several Huron Christians. They were taken back to the Mohawk village where they were gruesomely tortured. It was during this torture that several of Jogues' fingers were cut off by his captors.
St. Isaac Jogues survived this torment and went on to live as a slave among the Mohawks for some time, even attempting to teach his captors the rudiments of Christianity. He was finally able to escape thanks to the pity of some Dutch merchants who smuggled him back to Manhattan. From there, he managed to sail back to France, where he was greeted with surprise and joy. As a "living martyr", Jogues was given a special permission by Pope Urban VIII to say Holy Mass with his mutilated hands, as the Eucharist could not be touched with any fingers but the thumb and forefinger.
Yet his ill-treatment by the Mohawk Iroquois did not dim the missionary zeal of Jogues. Within a few months, he was on his way back to Canada to continue his work. In 1645, a tentative peace was forged between the Iroquois and the Hurons, Algonquins, and French. In the spring of 1646, Jogues was sent back to the Mohawk country along with Jean de Lalande to act as ambassador among them.
However, some among the Mohawks regarded Jogues as a practitioner of magic, and when the double-calamity of sickness and crop failure hit the Mohawks, Jogues was the easiest thing to blame their now prevalent problems on. On October 18, 1646, Jogues and LaLande were tomahawked in the neck (beheaded-not clubbed as some tell the story).
Today, the Shrine of the North American Martyrs, maintained by the Jesuits, stands on or near the site (ten years after Jogues' death, Saint Kateri Tekakwitha was born in approximately the same place). Brébeuf and five of his companions were killed in Canada in 1648 and 1649. The Mohawk Indians stripped him naked and beat him to death.
St. Issac Jogues was canonized on June 29, 1930 by Pope Pius XI along with seven other Canadian Martyrs. His Day of Remembrance is October 19. A statue of Father Jogues stands in the village of Lake George, in a park by the lake.
At Fordham University's Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx, New York, a freshman dormitory—Martyrs' Court—has three sections, which are named for the three U.S. martyr-saints: Isaac Jogues, René Goupil, and John LaLande. Dormitories at LeMoyne College in Syracuse and at Fairfield University in Connecticut are also named for Jogues.
The novitiate of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus just outside Wernersville, Pennsylvania was named for Jogues. It is now called the Jesuit Center at Wernersville, PA.
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