Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Catholic Register
June 20, 2025
One of the main points of every Jubilee Year is to invite the Christian faithful to come to Rome to pray in the heart of the Church. Holy Year doors are opened at the four patriarchal Basilicas precisely for people to pass through them, symbolically leaving their old life on one side of the door as they enter into a new life with Christ and the Church on the other.
Beginning with the great Jubilee of 2000, the Church has sought to draw people to Rome by the celebration of the Jubilee among certain groups. John Paul II scheduled special Jubilee events for craftsmen, professors, farmers, soldiers, police, government leaders, entertainers, health care workers, athletes, the sick, elderly, the disabled, migrants, families, lay people, catechists priests, and bishops.
Pope Francis in the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy in 2016 continued the pattern, inviting the same groups while adding special celebrations for boys and girls, deacons, members of the Roman Curia, religious and consecrated persons, Missionaries of Mercy, prisoners, and socially excluded people, like the homeless, poor and gypsies.
This approach has continued in the ongoing Jubilee of Hope, which has likewise scheduled special jubilee events for journalists, artists, volunteers, youth, workers, entrepreneurs, musical bands, Eastern churches, confraternities, grandparents, ecclesial movements, seminarians, digital missionaries and influencers, educators, and choirs.
The Jubilee-by-different-categories has proven successful in giving people an extra reason to come to Rome for an audience or Mass with the Pope together with their peers across the globe. With the relative ease of air travel, many are able to arrange their schedules to come at such appointed times, while others come to Rome on individual or group pilgrimages throughout the year.
A century ago, in the very early days of commercial air travel, it wasn’t so easy. Pope Pius XI tried a different approach to draw people to Rome for the Jubilee of 1925: through the beatification and canonization of those from different countries or with huge numbers of devotees. He scheduled a staggering number of beatifications and canonizations at St. Peter’s Basilica during the months of good weather that allowed the faithful, by train, automobiles, boats carriages and foot to make it to Rome.
Over a two week span in May, he canonized Therese of Lisieux (May 17), Peter Canisius (May 21), Madeleine Sophie Barat and Marie-Madeleine Postel (May 24), and John Vianney and John Eudes (May 31). Those were the first canonizations since Pope Pius XI was elected at the beginning of 1922. It is almost as if he were waiting for the Jubilee, especially since he did not have another canonization ceremony until 1930.
He also hadn’t beatified anyone for two years. During the 1925 Jubilee, however, he declared blessed Antonio Gianelli (April 19), Vincenzo Strambi (April 26), Joseph Cafasso (May 3), the 32 Ursuline Martyrs of Orange (May 10), Bogumilus (May 27), the 12 Martyrs of North Korea (June 6), Maria Desmaisieres (June 7), Bernadette Soubirous (June 14), the North American Martyrs (June 21), the 9 Korean Martyrs of the Small West Gate and 15 Martyrs of Seoul (July 5), and Peter Julian Eymard (July 26).
So over three months he had 15 different beatification and canonization ceremonies, sometimes three a week. The beatific barrage successfully tens of thousands to pack St. Peter’s Basilica for the various ceremonies.
I want to focus on the hundredth anniversary the Church in the United States will mark on Saturday, June 21, the centenary of the beatification of the North American Martyrs. These eight Jesuit missionaries, at the cost of enormous suffering, brought the Gospel from France to eastern Canada and New York State, all giving their blood in a holocaust of love for Christ and the indigenous peoples between 1642-49.
Five of them died in Ontario: Saints Jean de Brébeuf, Antoine Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier and Noël Chabanel. Three gave their life in Auriesville, New York: Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and Jean de Lalande.
400 years ago this June 19, Fathers Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemand arrived in Quebec with three others to serve French Catholics at Sainte-Marie of the Hurons in Ontario and evangelize the local tribes. It was super challenging work, learning difficult new languages, enduring brutal winters, befriending Indians and trying to propose the faith.
They had no naivety whatsoever about the fact that they might die for proclaiming the One who lived and died out of love for us. They not only accepted the possibility, but with courageous and clearsighted faith in the resurrection, even desired martyrdom if God willed it for the conversion of those they were serving. Brébeuf vowed to Jesus, “As far as I have the strength, I will never fail to accept the grace of martyrdom, if some day you in your infinite mercy would offer it to me.”
That grace would come in 1649, when he would be martyred in one of the most gruesome accounts in all of hagiography. He was stripped naked and beaten with clubs on every part of his body. The Hurons cut off his hands, applied white-hot tomakawks to his armpits and groin, and fastened searing sword blades around his neck. They then covered him with bark soaked in pitch and resin and lit him on fire. During all of this, as eyewitness recount in The Jesuit Relations, he continued to encourage and exhort the Christian converts around him to remain faithful. To stop his preaching, the savages plugged his mouth and tore off his lips, before, in mockery of baptism, they immersed him in a tub of boiling water. They then cut off his flesh, roasted it and ate it in front of him. The final blow came when they sliced open his chest and ripped out his beating, valiant heart, so that they could drink his blood while it was still warm.
Lalemant would die the day after by similar means, boiled in water and then burned at the stake. Garnier and Daniel would be shot by musket. Chabanel, Goupil, Jogues, and de Lalande would all be tomahawked.
The last three in the list were the first three to be slain, in Ossernenon, modern Auriesville, about 40 miles northwest of Albany along the Mohawk River.
Americans should have a special devotion to them as their faith and martyrdom helped plant the seeds of the Gospel in North America and their blood sanctified the soil in the place where a decade later Saint Kateri Tekakwitha would be born.
Now at the place of their martyrdom and Tekakwitha’s birth is the National Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs. I like to call it the holiest place in the country after the tabernacle closest to you, since the Shrine is intimately associated with four saints.
After their beatification a century ago, there was a huge celebration at the site, attended by thousands, including the then Lieutenant Governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Five years later, after Pius XI canonized the North American Martyrs on June 29, 1930, they laid the cornerstone for the Coliseum, which would soon become by far the largest Church in the country seating 8,000 people.
This Saturday, in that hallowed space, to celebrate the centenary, I will be honored to celebrate Mass, preach a Day of Recollection, and lead a Eucharistic procession into the ravine where Jogues reverently buried Goupil’s body in 1642.
The Coliseum has 70 doors, one for each of the 70 disciples Jesus sent out to proclaim the Gospel. It’s a reminder that the work of these eight great heroes, bringing Christ to North America, continues.
It’s one of the reasons why Pope Pius XI, called by tradition the “Pope of the Missions” for all that he did to promote the Church’s commitment to spreading the faith, beatified these great missionaries a century ago.
While we will likely never have to suffer to share the Gospel the way they did, our apostolic zeal should be just as great.