Saints of the American Wilderness

French priests enter a war zone where captured Westerners are paraded before their captors, tortured, and then beheaded. Their desecrated bodies get dumped by the roadside. Iraq in 2007? The Gaza Strip? Western Afghanistan? No. A place more dangerous: Canada in the 1600s. On rivers and in forests, Iroquois slaughter Huron and Europeans kill for land and power. It's a landscape of blood and horror whose viciousness eclipses the terrorism that shocks us today. Into this iniquitous land go dozens of stouthearted Jesuits, the purest examples of Roman Catholic virtue our Western continent has ever seen. Their purpose? To baptize souls and preach the gospel to savages whose degraded, vicious lives cry out for the light of Christ. Many of these Jesuits were murdered, and today eight of them are saints. Six were priests: Isaac Jogues, Jean de Br beuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Antoine Daniel, Charles Garnier, and No l Chabanel; two were lay assistants: Ren Goupil and Jean Lalande. They are the Jesuit Martyrs of North America, and this is their story. From letters these brave men wrote to their superiors by the light of Indian campfires or while skimming lovely waters in swift canoes, John A. O'Brien has crafted the terrifying, inspiring, and true tale of the dangerous struggle they engaged in for enormous stakes: the salvation of countless souls mired in darkness. Patient, charitable, and heedless of their own lives, these eight Jesuits spoke constantly of Jesus, baptized thousands, and even in the shadow of death brought them the consoling graces of the Sacraments. Between times they cared for souls dying of smallpox, cleaned festering wounds, and day in and day out returned love for hatred, blessings for curses, and prayers for abuse. This book tells of these good men who sought nothing less than the conversion of a continent. Their zeal won for them the imperishable crown of martyrdom and sanctified with their holy blood the soil of North America.