— FEAST DAYS · THE CANADIAN MARTYRS —

September 26, 2026 · Feast

The Canadian Martyrs

One hundred years ago, on June 26, 1926, some 10,000 people gathered near Midland, Ontario, for the first Mass at a new shrine dedicated to eight men who had died almost three centuries earlier. They arrived by train, automobile and horse and buggy. The eight Canadian Martyrs had been beatified only the year before, and devotion to them was spreading rapidly across Canada.

But who were these men, and why had their story endured for so long? Six were French Jesuit priests — Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Antoine Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier and Noël Chabanel — and two, René Goupil and Jean de La Lande, were lay companions. They had travelled to New France during the seventeenth century to live and work among Indigenous peoples, particularly the Wendat around Georgian Bay. They learned the language, travelled between communities and remained through epidemics, warfare and growing danger. Between 1642 and 1649, all eight were killed.

Canadian Martyrs holy card, c. 1930. Author unknown. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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What makes their story remarkable is not simply that they died. Several knew exactly how dangerous the mission had become and chose to remain — or even to return.

Isaac Jogues is perhaps the clearest example. Captured in 1642, he endured prolonged captivity and torture before escaping with Dutch assistance and eventually returning to France. His hands had been so badly injured that special permission from Pope Urban VIII was obtained so that he could celebrate Mass despite his damaged fingers. He was safe in France. Yet he asked his Jesuit superiors to send him back to New France and eventually sought permission to return to the Mohawk country where he had suffered. He was killed at Ossernenon in October 1646. Jean de La Lande, who accompanied him on that final journey, went knowing the danger as well. A contemporary account recorded that it was his “desire of serving God” that led him into a country where he expected he might die.

Why would they do it? Their own writings and the accounts of those who knew them point to a deeply held religious conviction. They believed their missionary vocation was a call from God and that bringing the Gospel to the people with whom they lived was worth the risks they faced. Jean de Brébeuf had made a personal vow not to turn away if martyrdom came. The missionaries learned Wendat languages and customs and lived among the communities they hoped to serve. For them, remaining when conditions became dangerous was bound up with both their faith and their commitment to the mission they had undertaken.

Their deaths also have to be understood within the violent world in which they were living. European diseases had devastated Wendat communities, while warfare between the Wendat and Haudenosaunee was intensified by European colonial and commercial alliances. Missionaries were sometimes associated with disease or regarded as allies of their Indigenous enemies. Some were killed during attacks on Wendat settlements, while others died after capture. The story remembered by the Church as martyrdom unfolded within a much larger tragedy experienced by the Indigenous peoples of the region.

Nearly three centuries later, their memory had not disappeared. Pope Pius XI beatified the eight in 1925. That same year, the Jesuits purchased land overlooking the Wye Valley and the former mission of Sainte-Marie near Midland and began building a permanent shrine. The Shrine Church opened on June 26, 1926, before that remarkable gathering of approximately 10,000 pilgrims.

While devotion to the martyrs was growing in Canada, their cause for canonization was also advancing in Rome. In the years leading up to 1930, two reported cures were investigated and ultimately accepted by the Catholic Church as miraculous. Both involved women suffering from severe tubercular peritonitis, a dangerous form of tuberculosis affecting the abdomen. Marie Robichaud, known in religious life as Sister Savoie, had become gravely ill and was considered beyond further effective treatment. Her religious community prayed for the intercession of the Canadian Martyrs, after which her recovery was reported as immediate and lasting. Alexandrina Ruel, known as Sister Maria Maxima, had suffered years of serious illness and undergone operations before she too invoked the martyrs and experienced a recovery described as immediate and permanent. After medical and ecclesiastical investigation, Pope Pius XI formally accepted the two cures as miracles in the canonization cause.

Then, only four years after the shrine opened, Pope Pius XI canonized the eight Canadian Martyrs together at St. Peter’s Basilica on June 29, 1930. Canadian newspapers treated the occasion as major news, reporting large Canadian groups travelling to Rome, enormous crowds and descendants of the martyrs’ families among those attending. Newspapers repeatedly hailed the eight as the “first saints of the North American continent,” reflecting just how momentous the canonization appeared to Canadians at the time.

In 1940, Pope Pius XII named the Canadian Martyrs the secondary patrons of Canada, after St. Joseph. Their story had travelled an extraordinary distance — from the seventeenth-century missions of New France to a national shrine and canonization in Rome. The Shrine Church built in their honour still stands near Midland, Ontario, and in 2026 it marks its centennial — one hundred years after those first 10,000 pilgrims gathered there.

Newspaper illustration of the newly built Canadian Martyrs Shrine near the historic Sainte-Marie mission site, 1926.

The Toronto Star, 19 June 1926. Newspapers.com.