Quote of the Day (Francis Parkman, on St. Rene Goupil)

“Three of the Hurons had been burned to death, and [Fr. Isaac Jogues and lay missionary Rene Goupil] expected to share their fate. A council was held to pronounce their doom but dissensions arose, and no result was reached. They were led back to the first village, where they remained, racked with suspense and half dead with exhaustion. Jogues, however, lost no opportunity to baptize dying infants, while Goupil taught children to make the sign of the cross. On one occasion, he made the sign on the forehead of a child, grandson of an Indian in whose lodge they lived. The superstition of the old savage was aroused. Some Dutchmen had told him that the sign of the cross came from the Devil, and would cause mischief. He thought that Goupil was bewitching the child; and, resolving to rid himself of so dangerous a guest, applied for aid to two young braves. Jogues and Goupil, clad in their squalid garb of tattered skins, were soon after walking together in the forest that adjoined the town, consoling themselves with prayer, and mutually exhorting each other to suffer patiently for the sake of Christ and the Virgin, when, as they were returning, reciting their rosaries, they met the two young Indians, and read in their sullen visages an augury of ill. The Indians joined them, and accompanied them to the entrance of the town, where one of the two, suddenly drawing a hatchet from beneath his blanket, struck it into the head of Goupil, who fell, murmuring the name of Christ. Jogues dropped on his knees, and, bowing his head in prayer, awaited the blow, when the murderer ordered him to get up and go home. He obeyed, but not until he had given absolution to his still breathing friend, and presently saw the lifeless body dragged through the town amid bootings and rejoicings.”—Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867)

I had heard about Fr. Isaac Jogues before, but the story of his associate, Rene Goupil—the first canonized martyr in what is now the United States, in present-day Ossernenon, N.Y.— only came to my attention this past weekend, when he was mentioned in a newsletter from Fr. Joseph O’Brien, the current director of Carmelite Missions who has long been associated with my parish of St. Cecilia in Englewood, NJ.

On this day in 1642, Fr. Jogues experienced one of the most agonizing days of his life. On September 29, Rene Goupil had been murdered in the fashion described by Francis Parkman in the above passage. The next day, Jogues—who had not only witnessed Goupil’s killing but also, like him, had been subjected to extreme torture by his Native-American captors over the last few days--found the corpse of his friend at the bottom of a ravine, stripped naked and gnawed by dogs. Jogues had covered the corpse with stones, intending to secretly bury it to prevent further desecration.

But a storm overnight disrupted Jogues’ plans, and when he came out on October 1, Goupil’s remains were gone. A search in nearby rocks, thicket and forest turned up nothing. By the side of the stream, the sobbing priest had to chant the services of the dead.

It was not until the following spring that Jogues discovered that Goupil’s corpse had been carried way not by the storm, but by the Mohawks, the same tribe that had subjected the pair to relentless beating with knotted sticks, tearing off hair, beards, and nails, and the biting of their forefingers. Mohawk children told him that Goupil’s further-decomposed remains were further downstream. Jogues gathered up the scattered bones and hid them in a hollow tree, hoping to eventually bury them in consecrated ground.

It was a lonely end for a young doctor filled not only with religious zeal but also with care and concern for those he treated. Goupil had intended to be a Jesuit, but had to leave the novitiate because of deafness. Yet such was his devotion that, after studying surgery, he had offered his services to the Jesuits in New France (modern Canada). Just before his murder, he had, in the presence of Jogues, professed vows as a Jesuit lay brother.

Religious commitment can not only require humility, but reinforce it in the most devastating fashion. So it was with the prophet Jeremiah, St. Paul, and Jesus himself, who, while hanging on the cross, asked, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” That lesson was compounded in the case of the North American Jesuit Martyrs. By 1650, the religious order was backpedaling on its commitment in North America, with virtually nothing to show for their heroic efforts.

The full story of this awaited a New England historian—Francis Parkman, who came from venerable Protestant stock and, predictably, evoked the “contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism.” For all his prejudices against Catholics, though, Parkman had to acknowledge the bravery of Goupil, Jogues and their Jesuit colleagues, even when it was accompanied by another slap at a faith he saw as alien and inimical to the United States:

“Let those who have prevailed yield due honour to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent.”

Goupil was canonized on 29 June 1930 by Pope Pius XI along with seven other Canadian Martyrs or "North American Martyrs" (including Jogues, who met his fate two years after the killing of Goupil)..

Quote of the Day (St. Peter, on the Power of the Cross)

“ ‘He himself bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; ‘by his wounds you have been healed.’”— 1 Peter 2:24

(The image accompanying this post is Crucifixion, by German 16th-century painter Peter Gertner.)

Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on St. Francis Xavier)

“He left his dust, by all the myriad tread

Of yon dense millions trampled to the strand,

Or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his head

Where dark seas whiten on a lonely land:

He left his work, what all his life had planned,

A waning flame to flicker and to fall,

Mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand,

And the light died in temple and in hall,

And the old twilight sank and settled over all.”—Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “St. Francis Xavier” (1892)

Four hundred and sixty years ago tomorrow, the Jesuit Francis Xavier died of a fever in China, still awaiting passage to China, thousands of miles from his native Basque region of Spain and unable to fulfill his ambition to preach his faith to one more land in the Orient. That fate strikes me as terribly lonely.

That same sense informs the above passage from a larger poem about the missionary saint by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936). The verses won a prize for the future essayist-novelist, then an 18-year-old at St. Paul’s School, an English academic institution that had earlier produced John Milton and Samuel Pepys.

In a sense, the turn in the poem, almost despite its author’s intention, reflects the later evolution of his own religious thinking. Certain anti-Catholic references (“Yon dim Enchantress with her mystic claim” and “monkish myths”) may very well have appealed to the authorities at his school.

Remarkably, however, even after proclaiming Xavier’s “Eastern Church a dream, his toil a vanity,” Chesterton couldn’t help but admire the indefatigable fortitude and zeal of the Jesuit, and even went so far as to suggest that the surface disappointment of the saint’s last days did not end his story: “God only knows, man failing in his choice,/ How far apparent failure may succeed.”  Even amid what was still apprentice poetry, Chesterton is already exhibiting his lively, lifelong interest in paradox.

In spite of himself, Chesterton had come to feel a certain admiration for the greatest Christian missionary since St. Paul, a man who, in only 15 years between his ordination and death, had traveled to India, Ceylon, Japan, Borneo, and the Moluccas. In time, Chesterton would embrace the Roman Catholicism he had scorned in his youth, proclaiming its value, in an increasingly secular world, with the same zeal as the prototypical Jesuit missionary.

(This painting of St. Francis Xavier is held in the Kobe City Museum.)