Noël Chabanel

Noël Chabanel was born on 2 February 1613 at Saugues, in the Velay region of the Massif Central (in the present-day French department of Haute-Loire), in the Kingdom of France. At about the age of seventeen he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Toulouse, in 1630. After the usual Jesuit formation he taught rhetoric in colleges of the Toulouse province and was esteemed by contemporaries for learning and piety. Drawn by reports of the missions in New France, he was sent to Canada in 1643 and assigned to the Jesuit residence of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, in Wendat (Huron) country in the region later called Huronia, in present-day Ontario.

Unlike several of his fellow missionaries, Chabanel found the Wendat language exceptionally difficult and never acquired fluency. He also found the food, lodging, and manner of life in the mission a heavy trial. Jesuit sources describe a period of interior aridity and a sense that his work bore little visible fruit. In 1647, on the feast of Corpus Christi, he made a vow to remain in the Huron mission until death, offering that repugnance as an act of fidelity. He continued to serve in supporting roles in the mission, including among the Petun (Tobacco Nation), as the military situation of the Wendat confederacy deteriorated under Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) attack.

In 1648–1649 those attacks destroyed the principal Wendat villages and the Jesuit residences. Sainte-Marie among the Hurons was abandoned and burned by the Jesuits themselves in May 1649. Chabanel was then with the mission among the Petun. On 7 December 1649 Father Charles Garnier was killed when the Petun mission of Saint-Jean was overrun. Chabanel had been sent away from that station. On 8 December 1649, while traveling, he was murdered by a Wendat man who had once been a Christian and who had turned against the missionaries, blaming them for the disasters that had struck his people. Traditional accounts state that Chabanel was struck down with a hatchet and that his body was thrown into the Nottawasaga River and was never recovered.

Chabanel is counted among the eight North American Martyrs, or Canadian Martyrs, of the Society of Jesus who died in the missions of New France between 1642 and 1649 (six priests and two donnés). 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 General Roman Calendar and in the United States, and on 26 September in Canada. In 1940 Pope Pius XII named the martyrs secondary patrons of Canada. In Jesuit and Canadian Catholic memory Chabanel is particularly associated with perseverance in a vocation that gave him little natural consolation, and with the vow by which he bound himself to remain among a people whose language and customs he never fully mastered.