The Protestant Reformation broke the hold of the Catholic Church on much of Europe.  Eventually, the Catholic Church counter-attacked.  One form appeared in the founding of a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, commonly called the Jesuits.  The Jesuits were formally founded in 1540 (lot of “f”s there).  One axis of their work lay in education within Europe. 

Another axis lay in foreign missionary work among pagans.  Francis Xavier left Lisbon for India in 1541, moved on to Indonesia in 1546, then to Japan in 1549.  Other Jesuits established missions in the Congo (1547), Morocco (1548), Brazil (1549), and Ethiopia (1557).  Soon they came to the Americas, reaching northern Florida in 1566, in Virginia in 1570, then establishing missions in Paraguay (see: “The Mission”) and French Canada (see: “Black Robe”).  In the later 16^th Century the Jesuits also opened missions in China, the Philippines, and Indochina (the future Vietnam). 

Kipling has a line of verse about adventurers “preaching ahead of the army, skirmishing ahead of the church.”  That was how it was for the Jesuits: they were often out in front of all supporting authority.  They paid the price for leaning forward in a large number of martyrs for the faith.  Indians killed the first Jesuit missionary in Florida, eight missionaries in Virginia, and eight in Canada and up-state New York. 

Take the case of Father Isaac Jogues (1607-1646).  He entered the order in 1624.  A dozen years later his superiors in Canada sent him to a mission among the Hurons at Georgian Bay.  In 1641 he was sent to start a new mission among the Ojibway near Sault (pronounced “soo”) Ste. Marie in Michigan.  The next year he and a fellow Jesuit were travelling with a Huron band back to Quebec.  Near Montreal a group of Mohawks fell upon them.  Taken as prisoners to the Mohawk town near today’s Auriesville, NY (go north on the Hudson River until you get to the Mohawk River, then bang a left), Jogues’s companion and the Hurons were all killed.  The Mohawks made Jogues run the gauntlet three times, then tortured him.  He survived these terrible experiences to spend more than a year as a slave.  Eventually he managed to escape on a Dutch fur trading ship that took him downriver to New Amsterdam (New York).  He returned to France on Christmas Day, 1644.  Everyone had figured that he was dead, so it appeared miraculous that he (well, as much of him as was left after the Mohawks were done with him) had risen from the grave.  He got a hero’s welcome.  He didn’t want a hero’s welcome.  He wanted to go back to New France to continue his missionary work.  He returned to Montreal in 1645.  Here the government sent him to the Mohawk town at Auriesville, NY (yes, that one) as an ambassador.  Still more incredible, after his safe return from this task, he obtained permission to go back to live at Auriesville to conduct his mission.  Three strikes and you’re out: he was accused of being a witch by the Mohawks and killed in October 1646. 

Twenty years later the French felt that they had taken enough guff off of the Mohawks.  The governor of New France, a hard old soldier named the Marquis de Tracy, led an expedition that burned all their villages and the crops in the field, and killed anybody they could get their hands on.  He told that survivors that they should become good Christians like him.  Otherwise, “I’ll be back.”  This seems to have calmed things down for a while. 

            There is a big shrine to the Jesuit martyrs in North America located at Auriesville, NY.  It has a nice view of the Mohawk River.  Probably the last thing Fr. Jogues saw.