Iroquois Atonement

Flat on the altar steps of the grey stone church at squat, dun-colored, little Caughnawaga, Quebec one day last fortnight lay Michael Jacobs, 32. When he arose an ordained Jesuit priest, pledged to missionary work among Indians around Caughnawaga, many a spectator felt that an old, old debt had been partly paid.

It was nearly 300 years since a Jesuit priest named Isaac Jogues set out from Orleans, France to win North American Indians for Christ. He made some progress among the sedentary Hurons, at the price of hate and fear from the warlike Iroquois. One day in 1642 a band of Mohawk Iroquois caught him by the St. Lawrence with some Huron converts. They took him to their village in what is now New York State, amusing themselves along the way by ripping out his fingernails, chopping off his thumbs, plucking out his hairs, heaping live coals on his body. Escaping after 14 months he went back to the scene of his captivity three years later to establish a mission. As he entered a cabin an Iroquois tomahawk cleaved his skull, starting him on the road to sainthood.

In 1649 some Iroquois caught some Hurons with two more of their Jesuit friends, gigantic Jean de Brebeuf and frail Gabriel Lalemant. Stripping their captives, they promptly set about pounding them with clubs, searing them with glowing irons, tearing out their fingernails. Father Brebeuf exhorted his comrades to bear up bravely. The Iroquois cut out his tongue. Father Brebeuf's eyes still sparked courage. The Iroquois gouged them out, dropped live coals in the sockets. They draped a red-hot necklace over his head. Then they scalped him, baptized him with boiling water.

Some of the warriors who in grudging admiration drank Father Brebeuf's blood and ate his heart lived to enter the Jesuit mission at Caughnawaga as Christian converts. But four more Jesuits and two lay companions died martyrs' deaths before the Iroquois began to relent. And never until scholarly, unassuming Michael Jacobs, born Wishe Karhaienton, was ordained, had a full-blooded Mohawk Iroquois donned the black robe which made him a spiritual brother of Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brebeuf.

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