FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF JESUITS IN CANADA

 

by Pierre Leger (Brebeuf College School)

 

Winner of the Jesuit Essay Contest

 

For four hundred years, the Society of Jesus has worked to bring the light of Christ to Canada. Through centuries of patient labour, they have left an undeniable mark on the Church here, and have been involved in all aspects of church life; preaching, ministering to the sick, and building schools to bring up youth in the ways of Christ. Their greatest contribution to the Church, however, remains their original mission; to evangelize the Gospel to the native inhabitants of this New World. By spreading the Good News to these people on the periphery of the world, they have brought them Christ’s salvation. The Jesuits determinedly pursued this mission in the face of hardship, persecution and martyrdom.

 

The calling of all Christians is to spread the Gospel; to “Go throughout the whole world and preach the Gospel to all mankind.” (Mark 16:15). The first Saints healed the sick and worked miracles, but their true mission was to evangelize to those who had not heard the Good News. They traversed the Roman Empire and beyond, spreading the Gospel to the gentiles. When the New World was opened to the Europeans, noble men like the Jesuits saw it as a great opportunity to win new souls for Christ. When they arrived in Canada, they found that the First Nations people were practising their ancestral spirituality, and had never heard the Word of Christ. As many Jesuits asserted in the Relations, they were practising a shamanic idol-worship; in 1648, Father Bressani wrote “…at the date of their arrival they found not a single soul possessing a knowledge of the true God…”1

The Jesuits took it as their apostolic duty to bring the Word of God to these people who had yet to experience the love of Christ, and to give them the gift of faith, which is greater than any other. “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:10). In evangelizing to the natives, living at the end of the world, the Jesuits brought God’s plan of salvation closer to fruition, the greatest accomplishment anyone could ever claim. They worked towards the fulfillment of the mission of the Church itself; bringing all the people of the world to eternal life with Jesus Christ.

What gives the Jesuits’ missions to the natives even greater significance is the uniqueness of their approach which resulted in their eventual successes. The aboriginals possessed a radically different culture from the Europeans, and many Catholic orders failed to make an impression on them. The Franciscans were among the first missionaries in the New World, but the natives were indifferent to them and their message. Only the Jesuits had success in evangelizing them by reaching out to them in more ways than one, such as learning their language, understanding their culture, and seeking to meet many of their immediate needs. Unlike other orders, who “tended to find no good in cultures untouched by either the message they sought to impart or the kind of civilization they themselves represented,”2, the Jesuits “tended…to note the good as well as what they considered the bad in the Amerindian cultures.”3 The Jesuits understood and celebrated the innate dignity of the human person; a rarity in the Age of Exploration. They lived among the natives, learned their language and traditions, and preached Christ’s message in a way the natives could appreciate. Their patience overcame the trials of this land, and they succeeded in what their contemporaries could not; reaching out to this very different group of people, and sharing with them the love of Christ. Despite incredible adversity, they refused to give up, and so won salvation for many.

Furthermore, the Jesuits did not see “preaching” as simply dictating a set of rules and beliefs to their followers. They assisted the tribes in times of hardship, and stood in solidarity with them; truly living a Christian life. Natives would often leave their sick outside of Jesuit missions, where they were universally taken in and nursed back to health.  The Jesuits even used this experience of physical healing to gently encourage their patients towards baptism and conversion. During the various epidemics that struck the natives’ wilderness communities, the Jesuits were pressed especially hard, often targeted by the diseases themselves, but never deserted the natives, providing whatever relief and healing they could, and standing as a beacon of Christ’s loving presence.

The Jesuits’ work with the natives strongly reflected the example that our Lord had set for us when He preached the Kingdom of God to the people of His time. Like Jesus, when He tended the needs of those He served, as in the feeding of the five thousand and healing of the sick, the Jesuits involved themselves in the spiritual as well as the physical needs of the people; making their doctrine real by sharing in the natives’ toil. The Jesuits improved the quality life of the natives by introducing technology in the form of metal, medicine, and building practices.

Although the work of the Jesuits embraces a wide variety of apostolates and ministries, I feel that their work with the First Nations community is the most highly commended achievement because I see the work of evangelization as the centre of our Christian mission. According the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ last instruction to his disciples was to “Go then to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptize them in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28: 19-20). Reflecting on the work of the Jesuits among the First Nations, I am struck by their exemplary efforts in imitating the work of our Lord when He came to preach the Kingdom of God to the world. Just like Jesus, the work of the Jesuits brought them into the lives of the people they were ministering. It is through their love for the people they served, that the seed of the Gospel was sown.

 

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