Newsletter #38
Dear Friends and Benefactors, 09/30/2020
“He (Father Charles Garnier) would walk thirty or forty miles in the summer heat over enemy country just to baptize a dying Indian.” [The Saints]
There was a time when America was truly Catholic. In other words, there was no Christian presence in the vast territory of North America, the area now called the United States, except the Catholic one. One can only appreciate the heroic efforts of the earlier Catholic missionaries in this nation, if they read some Church history and understand the importance of the Catholic dogma: “Outside the Church, there is no salvation”, one of the many dogmas denied by modern-day Catholics in the Novus Ordo church, the counterfeit church of Vatican II.
As Catholic historians summarize, even as late as the beginning of the 19th century, three-quarters of the territory – all the land west of the Mississippi – remained Catholic. Let us first recall the Catholic America which earlier was.
The event which today marks in the minds of most Americans the beginning of their history was the landing in 1620 of the so-called Pilgrim Fathers at a place they named Plymouth on the coast of what is now Massachusetts. However, nearly a century before then, in 1528, a Spanish Franciscan priest, Father Juan Juarez, was designated Bishop of Florida.
That was but 15 years after Florida was discovered by Juan Ponce de Leon on Easter Sunday, 1513, and no more than 36 after Christopher Columbus, sailing under the flag of Catholic Spain, made his first voyage to the New World and planted a cross on its shores. (in Spanish, Easter Sunday was known as Pascua Florida, Flowery Easter, which is how the land discovered and named by Ponce de Leon is still called Florida).
Bishop Juarez died in his diocese the year of his appointment. If he was killed by Indians, as were many in his party (we do not know how, or exactly when, he died), he would be the first American martyr. However, of the 116 American martyrs whose names over the years have been submitted to Rome for canonization, the title of American protomartyr is bestowed on Father Juan de Padilla, another Franciscan. A chaplain attached to the 1541-42 expedition of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado deep into the American heartland, Father de Padilla was slain by Indians at a spot in today’s Kansas which is practically the geographical center of the continental U.S.
Three more martyrs: Father Luis Cancer, Father Diego Tolosa and Hermano Fuentes, all Dominicans. They were murdered by Indians soon after going ashore on the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 1549, near Tampa Bay. The bay had been discovered 10 years before, 1539, by Hernando de Soto, and was named by him Espiritu Santo, Holy Spirit, because the discovery took place on Pentecost Sunday. (From Florida, De Soto would go on to explore lands we now know as Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas. At one point his path nearly crossed that of Coronado).
The Spanish explorations of Florida would lead to the founding, on September 8, 1565, of the first city in what is now the U.S. This was St. Augustine, named that by its founder, Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles, because he sighted the peninsula on which it stands on the feast day of the great saint, Saint Augustine, August 28.
Accompanying the admiral were 12 Franciscan priests and 4 Jesuits. They would be followed by an army of missionaries who set out to evangelize Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and later the Carolinas and Virginia, as well as Florida, from their base in St. Augustine.
To speak of an army of missionaries is not to exaggerate. In all, from the end of the 15th century until 1822, Spain sent to America 16,000 missionaries who were members of religious orders. Also active as missionaries were countless diocesan priests and religious who were born in Spanish territories in the Western Hemisphere.
If their work of evangelization was initially blessed, it soon enough suffered because of the incursion of Protestants. The first on the scene were Huguenots to whom it was seldom sufficient to destroy the Catholic settlements they attacked and overran. It was common for them to put to the sword the Catholic missionaries and native converts who fell into their hands.
It was the same story with the English after they began settling coastal areas north of Florida. For instance, in 1704 the English governor of South Carolina, Moore, led a military expedition against Apalachee Mission in Florida. Capturing three Franciscan priests, he executed them along with 800 Catholic Indians. He also forced into slavery another 1,400 Indians who were living at Apalachee.
Nearly a century before then and far to the northwest, in today’s New Mexico, Pedro de Peralta in 1609 founded a city which he named Royal City of the Holy Faith, Santa Fe. Peralta built on one side of the town’s central plaza, in the manner typical of Spanish settlements, 11 churches or missions had been built in and around Santa Fe by 1617, and in 1625 there were 43 churches serving 34,000 Catholic Indians.
The existence in the early 17th century of a thriving center like Santa Fe wants to be known not simply because it predates the arrival at Plymouth in 1620 of the Pilgrims and their first encounter with some Indians. There is also a widespread notion today that America west of the Mississippi, the whole territory that was Spanish and French and therefore Catholic as late as 1800, was a wilderness untouched by civilization until English-speaking Protestants settled in it during the 19th century. The existence of a center like Santa Fe shows the notion to be false.
If the Hugenots and English Protestants impeded the Spanish missionaries’ work of evangelization, it also has to be admitted that these heroes of the Faith were not always as successful in bringing it and its civilizing influence to the native population as they were at Santa Fe. There was much about Christianity and Christian living that many Indians at first found unacceptable. Thus, 5 Franciscans were martyred in Georgia in 1597 for trying to introduce monogamy among local Indians. At Mission Santa Elena in South Carolina, the Jesuit Father Juan Rogel found that 8 months of religious instruction led to nothing when a council of Indian chiefs objected to the requirement of renouncing the devil before Baptism. (Many Indians worshiped the devil. It was to Satan they offered human sacrifices).
In all, from Juan de Padilla in Kansas in 1542 to Antonio Diaz de Leon in 1834 in Texas, 80 Spanish missionary priests and brothers were martyred in America. Most of them were Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans. 21 Franciscans died at one time in New Mexico in 1680. 8 Jesuits were killed at one time in Virginia in 1570 at a site near the Rappahannock River which would be within commuting distance of today’s Washington, D.C.
The French arrived in what is now the United States later than the Spanish, but they also helped make most of the country what it initially was: CATHOLIC. Numberless existing names testify to it, and none more gloriously than the “Gateway to the West”, St. Louis, named for France’s great King Louis IX, crusader, friend and patron of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and a saint canonized in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII after the Catholic Church examined 65 miracles attesting to his sanctity. “A Christian should argue with a blasphemer only by running his sword through his bowels as far as it will go,” King Saint Louis declared. As for Pope Boniface VIII, the Pontiff who canonized him, he declared in his Bull ‘Unam Sanctam’ in 1302: “We declare, say, define and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
This solemn declaration, along with 2 others, would be the driving force of Catholic missionaries worldwide. The other two are the following:
“There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one at all can be saved.” [Pope Innocent III, Fourth Lateran Council, 1215].
“The most Holy Roman Catholic Church firmly believes, professes, and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but they will go into eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the Sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their alms-givings, their other works of Christian piety and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his alms-giving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.” [Pope Eugene IV, the Bull ‘Cantate Domino’, 1441].
The city named for Saint Louis was founded fairly late, but before there was a United States. It was in 1764. By then, French explorers and missionaries had been active in and around today’s U.S. for more than 2 centuries, the first was the Italian-born mariner Giovanni Verrazano. In the service of France’s King Francois I, he became in 1524 the first European to enter the New York Harbor. During that voyage he explored most of the East Coast from the Carolinas to Newfoundland.
The list of French who brought the Faith and European Catholic civilization to these shores is long. It includes Marquette, Cartier, Champlain, LaSalle (who opened Illinois to French settlement), the brothers Lemoyne (one of whom founded New Orleans in 1718), and others. None matter more than the 8 canonized by the Church in 1930 as the Martyrs of North America. They are Saints Rene Goupil, Jean Lalande, Isaac Jogues, Antony Daniel, Jean de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier and Noel Chabanel, listed here according to the chronology of their martyrdom from 1642 to 1649.
We need to understand what it was that motivated these men and their Spanish brethren in the Faith. Why were these men willing to die as they did? (In all cases it was in a horrible manner).
In reference to the canonized North American Martyrs, Coulson’s biographical dictionary, ‘The Saints’, tells us that Father Charles Garnier, born to considerable wealth in Paris, “would walk 30 or 40 miles in the summer heat over enemy country just to baptize a dying Indian.”
Coulson tells us that in his missionary travels, Father LeJeune, the Jesuit Superior to these 8 North American Martyr Saints, “tasted the four worst aspects of Indian life: cold, heat, smoke and dogs. Of these he found smoke by far the worst. It filled the hut in which men, women and dogs slept together around the fire, and prolonged to exposure to it usually brought blindness in the end, a fact which caused LeJeune to remark: ‘Unhappy infidels who spent their lives in smoke, and their eternity in flames.’”
Taking Father LeJeune’s words seriously, the canonized North American Martyrs (like their uncanonized Spanish brethren) were ready to undergo all they did in order to save as many Indians as they could from eternal fire. They paid dearly for their charity. How dearly? Here is some of the accounts we have of the martyrdom of Father Jean de Brebeuf. (This account is provided by another Jesuit missionary, Father Christopher Regnant. We shall begin by summarizing him, and then go to direct quotation.)
Taken captive by the Iroquois Indians, Father de Brebeuf was stripped naked and tied to a post. He was beaten with clubs. His fingernails were then torn out. In a mockery of Baptism, a cauldron of boiling water was poured over him. Then, there followed a string of hatchets heated by fire to red-hot and which was strung around his neck. Next, a belt of pitch was tied around his waist and set afire. The Indians then cut out his tongue. After that they began to flay him, that is, cut and strip the skin off his body.
They still were not done. As Father Regnant writes: “Those butchers, seeing that the good father began to grow weak, made him sit down on the ground, and one of them, taking a knife, cut off the skin covering his skull. Another one, seeing that the good father would soon die, made an opening in the upper part of his chest, and tore out his heart, which he roasted and ate. Others came to drink his blood, still warm, which they drank with both hands.”
We will add one more example for justifying the zeal of these missionaries. Here is a piece of writing from the pen of another Jesuit missionary and canonized saint, Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit Apostle to the Indies who lived (1506-1552) a century before the North American Martyrs:
“Before their Baptism, certain Japanese were greatly troubled by a hateful and annoying scruple: that God did not appear merciful and good because He had never made Himself known to the Japanese people before, especially if it was true that those who had not worshiped God were doomed to everlasting punishment in Hell. One of the things which torments them most is that we teach that the prison of Hell is irrevocably shut, so that there is no escape from it. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, their parents, and relatives, and they often show their grief by tears. So, they ask us if there is any way to free them by prayer from the eternal misery. And I am obliged to answer that there is absolutely none.”
How many missionaries today, who call themselves Catholic, can be regarded as equal to Saint Francis Xavier and the countless other missionaries who took seriously Our Lord Jesus Christ’s last commandment to His followers, to make disciples of all the nations? The missionaries would include, first of all, the very Apostles who heard the commandment directly and set out to convert the lands of the Roman Empire, but also those who sought to make America Catholic beginning virtually as soon as Catholics discovered her. If these missionaries are today incomprehensible to modern society, even Catholics in the Novus Ordo church, then the incomprehension is rooted in unbelief. (The Great Apostasy mentioned in the Apocalypse and prophesied by the Blessed Virgin Mary at Quito, La Salette, and Fatima). Modern men, even those who call themselves Catholics, do not believe in the same things as did Saint Francis Xavier and the North American Martyrs, or they do not believe in anything at all. Novus Ordo Catholics are apt to be of the “cafeteria”-type. They pick and choose which of the Church’s teachings they will believe, and willfully reject other teachings such as, “Outside the Church, there is no salvation”, or “contraception is intrinsically evil”. But the end for these poor souls who remain obstinate in this mortally sinful state, is eternal punishment in a pit of fire with no escape.
AVE MARIA !
Father Joseph Poisson
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