A reflection for the Memorial of Sts. John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, Priests, and Companions, Martyrs
Find today’s readings here.
I will send to them prophets and apostles;
some of them they will kill and persecute
in order that this generation might be charged
with the blood of all the prophets
shed since the foundation of the world,
from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah
who died between the altar and the temple building.
Yes, I tell you, this generation will be charged with their blood!
A number of years ago, I traveled to Lowell, Mass., to research a story for America on Jack Kerouac. Despite his reputation as a peripatetic Beat author, Kerouac spent most of his life in his hometown of Lowell, and almost all of his novels are semi-autobiographical tales set there; I thought revisiting those haunts might give some insight into Kerouac’s life and art.
One of my first sites to visit was one that looms large in Kerouac’s Doctor Sax: a replica of the grotto at Lourdes in France. For decades, Lowell’s mostly French-Canadian residents (Kerouac grew up speaking Quebecois, a dialect of French) would climb the steps of the shrine on their knees to pray—something Kerouac recounts doing with his mother. For an Irish Catholic, the shrine is a glimpse into a different kind of Catholicism, one where corporeality and the sanguinity of existence (and salvation) play a larger role. Franco-American Catholicism, it struck me, is just a lot more bloody than the spare and somber version many American Catholics experience.
Today is a reminder that salvation history involves bodies, ones that suffer and die.
I had the same reaction a few years later when visiting Montreal, where pilgrims to its largest shrine, the Oratory of Saint Joseph, ascend 283 steep steps to reach the chapel (A third set of wooden steps is denoted “Réservé aux pèlerins qui montent à genoux,” “Reserved for pilgrims climbing on their knees.”), where the heart of St. André Bessette is on display—and I mean on display, literally floating in formalin inside a glass reliquary. There it was again, a bloodier Catholicism, one more attuned to corporeal reality than the standard American Catholic vibe.
What does all this have to do with today’s readings? Because it is the feast of the North American Martyrs, the physical sacrifice of the “prophets and Apostles” mentioned in the Gospel has an extra resonance. The stories of how men like St. Isaac Jogues, St. Jean de Brébeuf and six other martyrs suffered and died to spread the faith in French Canada are not for the faint of heart. I will send to them prophets and apostles; some of them they will kill and persecute. When read in the context of the martyrdom of those 17th-century missionaries, Jesus’ words can become less of a condemnation of his generation and more of an admonishment—maybe reminder is a more gentle way to put it—of us today, for forgetting or attenuating that reality.
Today is a reminder that salvation history involves bodies, ones that suffer and die. The spread of the Gospel requires sacrifice; the price of salvation is taking up the cross. What sacrifice of my own physical comfort, my own bodily security, am I willing to make for the faith? Carpal tunnel syndrome doesn’t count. The stories of the North American Martyrs and today’s readings both are a note to self that faith can have a cost, that good news isn’t always easily come by.
