René Goupil

René Goupil was born in 1608 at Saint-Martin-du-Bois in Anjou, in western France. He was trained as a surgeon, a practical formation that later defined both his work in New France and the patronage attached to his name. Drawn to the Society of Jesus, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Paris, but deafness compelled him to withdraw before profession. He did not give up the Jesuit missions. He offered himself instead as a donné, a lay auxiliary bound to the Jesuits by private contract rather than by public vows, and in 1640 he sailed for New France.

In the colony he served the sick, including at the hospital in Quebec, and made himself useful to the Jesuit fathers as a surgeon and laborer among French settlers and Indigenous peoples. In the summer of 1642 he was sent with the Jesuit priest Isaac Jogues on a supply journey from Quebec toward the Huron missions. On 2 August 1642 their canoe party was attacked on the Saint Lawrence River by Mohawk warriors. Goupil, Jogues, the donné Guillaume Couture, and several Huron companions were taken captive, beaten, forced to run the gauntlet, and marched south into the Mohawk valley to the village of Ossernenon, in what is now New York State.

At Ossernenon the prisoners underwent ritual torture. Goupil’s fingers were mutilated, a customary treatment of male captives and, in later Catholic memory, a share in the wounds of Christ. Jogues, the principal witness, described him as patient and prayerful. Wishing to die as a member of the order he had once tried to join, Goupil asked Jogues to receive his vows. Jogues admitted him as a temporal coadjutor of the Society of Jesus, so that Goupil became a Jesuit brother in the last weeks of his life.

On 29 September 1642 he was killed. Jogues related that Goupil had taught a Mohawk child to make the sign of the cross and had traced the sign on the child’s forehead. A man of the village, who had been told that the gesture was harmful sorcery, struck Goupil on the head with a tomahawk. Jogues reached him in time to give absolution. The body was dragged into a ravine; Jogues later recovered a skull and some bones and buried them as best he could. Goupil was about thirty-four. He was the first of the Jesuits and their donnés in New France to be put to death, and the first of those later called the North American Martyrs, or Canadian Martyrs.

Knowledge of his life depends above all on Jogues’s narrative, written after the priest’s escape and return to France. Devotion to Goupil and his companions took root in Canada and the United States, especially at the shrine at Auriesville identified with Ossernenon. Pope Pius XI beatified the group on 21 June 1925 and canonized them on 29 June 1930. The Church keeps their feast on 19 October in the General Roman Calendar and in the United States, and on 26 September in Canada. Because Goupil had been a surgeon, he is invoked as patron of anesthetists and anesthesiologists.