St. Isaac Jogues (1607-1646)
Apostle of the Mohawks

    St. Isaac Jogues was born at Orléans, France, on January 10, 1607. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1624, taught literature at Rouen, and was sent to Canada in 1636. For six years he worked in the Huron missions alongside St. Jean de Brébeuf. With Fr. Charles Raymbault he penetrated as far as Sault Ste. Marie, and the two were, in Bancroft's words, the first missionaries to preach the gospel a thousand miles in the interior, five years before John Eliot addressed the Indians six miles from Boston Harbour.

    On August 3, 1642, returning from Quebec, Jogues was captured near Three Rivers by a Mohawk war party, together with the donné St. René Goupil and a band of Huron converts. St. Goupil was killed; St. Jogues was tortured, several of his fingers gnawed or burned off, and carried to the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, on the river above the present city of Albany, where he spent thirteen months in slavery. The Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany) worked constantly for his release and finally helped him escape by sailing vessel to New Amsterdam, making him the first Catholic priest to reach Manhattan Island. He crossed the ocean in midwinter and landed on the coast of Brittany on Christmas morning, 1643. Pope Urban VIII received him as a martyr of Christ and granted him the exceptional privilege of celebrating Mass with his mutilated hands, which canon law did not otherwise allow.

    St. Jogues returned to Canada in the spring of 1644. In 1646 he was sent to negotiate peace with the Iroquois, traveling the same route over which he had been carried as a captive; on that journey he gave the name Lake of the Blessed Sacrament to the water now called Lake George. The treaty made, he asked to return to the Mohawk as a missionary, and his superiors at last consented. In the meantime sickness had broken out in the tribe and a blight had fallen on the crops, and both were laid to the missionary. Warned of the danger, St. Jogues continued on his way; his Huron companions fled, and only St. Jean de Lalande remained with him. On October 18, 1646, entering a cabin at Ossernenon, he was struck down with a tomahawk and beheaded. St. Lalande was killed the next day. St. Jogues was canonized by Pope Pius XI on June 29, 1930, with the seven other North American Martyrs; their feast is October 19.