St. Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in the former village of Ossernenon, present-day New York state. Her mother, brought up by Jesuits in Trois-Rivières, was taken captive and married to a Mohawk chieftain – the man who would later become St. Kateri’s father. When Kateri was four years old, a smallpox epidemic ravaged her native village, killing her parents and her younger brother, and leaving her with permanent damage to her face and her eyesight. Adopted by a paternal uncle, she was pressured to marry by her adoptive family but she refused. She converted to Catholicism at 19, and was baptized on Easter Sunday, 1676. Her adoptive family was unsympathetic to her, and she faced great opposition from others in her native village for her conversion. In 1677, she moved to Kahnawake, present-day Québec, where she lived as a consecrated virgin for another two years before dying at 24, after a long battle with various illnesses. Whether amidst of terrible hardship in Ossernenon, or in the relative peace of Kahnawake, St. Kateri remained steadfast in her devotion to God through prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

St. Kateri was canonized in 2012, joining figures like St. Rose of Lima, St. Martin de Porres, and St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, as one of several Indigenous people of the Americas to be numbered among the saints of the Catholic Church. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us!

In the early 1600s, the Wendat people near Georgian Bay made an alliance with the French, and in the 1630s, Jesuit missionaries, headquartered near present-day Midland, Ontario, began ministering to the Wendat. Among those missionaries were the eight Canadian Martyrs: St. René Goupil, St. Isaac Jogues, St. Jean de Lalande, St. Antoine Daniel, St. Jean de Brébeuf, St. Noël Chabanel, St. Charles Garnier, St. Gabriel Lalemant. 

In the preceding decades, warfare between the Wendat and the neighbouring Iroquois confederacy intensified, reaching its peak around the middle of the 17th century. As allies of the Wendat, the French were considered hostile by the Iroquois, and Jesuit missionaries were no exception: each of the Canadian Martyrs would be captured and killed during separate Iroquois raids throughout the 1640s. While bound to a cross in the hours leading up to their death, St. Jean de Brébeuf encouraged the Christian Hurons bound next to him to remain steadfast in their faith, and St. Gabriel Lalemant implored God for mercy on him, his fellow captives, and his executioners.

The Canadian Martyrs were canonized in 1930, and are all counted as some of the patron saints of Canada. Holy Canadian Martyrs, pray for us!