Jean de Lalande

Jean de Lalande was a French lay missionary of the seventeenth century who served as a donné to the Jesuit missions of New France and was killed in 1646 among the Mohawk. He was born in Dieppe in Normandy. Surviving records do not preserve a precise year of birth. As a young man he bound himself to the work of the Society of Jesus as a donné, a lay volunteer who took private vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and lived under Jesuit direction without entering the order as a priest or brother. Donnés performed the practical and often dangerous tasks of the missions: they farmed, built, traveled as companions to the priests, and shared the same risks of war and disease.

Lalande was sent to the mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, the fortified Jesuit residence in Wendat territory in present-day Ontario. The 1640s brought epidemics and Iroquois raids that shattered the Huron confederacy and the missions attached to it. Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit priest who had already been captured and mutilated by the Mohawk in 1642 and who had escaped to France, returned to the colony and in 1646 was chosen to carry a French peace embassy to the Mohawk. Jean de Lalande volunteered to go with him.

The two men traveled south from the St. Lawrence in September 1646. On reaching the Mohawk village of Ossernenon they found that a hostile faction, often identified with the Bear clan, had gained influence and regarded the French as bringers of death through witchcraft. On 18 October 1646 Jogues was struck down with a tomahawk. The next day, 19 October, Lalande was killed in the same way when he stepped outside the lodge where he was being held. Jesuit reports based on later testimony state that the heads of both men were placed on the village palisade and that their bodies were thrown into the river. Lalande thus died as a layman who had freely chosen to accompany a priest into territory known to be dangerous.

Together with Isaac Jogues, René Goupil, and five Jesuit priests killed in Huronia in 1648–1649, Lalande is counted among the North American Martyrs, also called the Canadian Martyrs. The group was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 21 June 1925 and canonized by the same pontiff on 29 June 1930. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 19 October in the United States and on 26 September in Canada. They are honored as patrons of Canada. The traditional site of Ossernenon is marked by the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs at Auriesville, New York. Little else is documented about Lalande’s inner life or earlier career; the Jesuit Relations are the chief contemporary witness to his death.