Catholic Family Celebrations
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  • Easter
  • Divine Mercy Sunday
  • May
    • Pentecost Novenas
    • May 1 St. Joseph the Worker
    • May 3 Sts. Philip and James
    • Mother's Day
    • May 10 St. Damien Molokai
    • May 13 Our Lady of Fatima
    • May 22 St. Rita
    • May 26 St. Philip Neri
    • May 31 Visitation
  • Ascension
  • Graduation
  • Pentecost
  • Trinity Sunday
  • Summer Fun
  • June
    • Corpus Christi
    • Father's Day
    • Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart
    • June 13 St. Anthony of Padua
    • June 24 Nativity of St. John the Baptisi
    • June 29 Sts. Peter and Paul
  • July
    • July 4th
    • July 6 St. Maria Goretti
    • July 11 St. Benedict
    • July 14 St. Kateri Tekakwitha
    • July 22 St. Mary Magdalene
    • July 25 St. James
    • July 26 Sts. Joachim and Anne
    • July 29 St. Martha
    • July 31 St. Ignatius of Loyola
  • August
    • Back to School
    • August 4 St. John Vianney
    • August 6 Transfiguration
    • August 8 St. Dominic
    • August 10 St. Lawrence
    • August 11 St. Clare
    • August 14 St. Maximillian Kolbe
    • August 15 Assumption
    • August 21 St. Pius X
    • August 22 Queenship of Mary
    • August 24 St. Bartholomew
    • August 27-August 29
  • September
    • Patrons of School and Study
    • Labor Day
    • Sept. 5 St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta
    • September 8 Mary's Birthday
    • September 15 Our Lady of Sorrows
    • September 20 St. Andrew Kim
    • September 21 St. Matthew
    • September 23 St. Padre Pio
    • September 27 St. Vincent DePaul
    • September 29 The Archangels
    • September 30 St. Jerome
  • October
    • Oct 1 St. Therese of the Child Jesus
    • October 2 Guardian Angels
    • October 4 St. Francis
    • October 7 Our Lady of the Rosary
    • October 17 St. Ignatius of Antioch
    • October 18 St. Luke
    • October 19 Sts. Isaac Jogues and John De Brebeuf
    • October 28 Sts. Simon and Jude
    • October 29 Blessed Chiara Badano
    • Halloween or All Hallow's Eve
  • November
    • November 1 All Saints Day
    • November 2 All Souls Day
    • November 9 Dedication of the Lateran Basilica
    • November 11 St. Martin of Tours
    • November 13 St. Frances Cabrini
    • November 15 St. Albert the Great
    • November 17 St. Elizabeth of Hungary
    • November 21 Presentation of Mary
    • November 22 St. Cecilia
    • November 30 St. Andrew
    • Thanksgiving
    • Christ the King
  • Advent/Dec.
    • Advent Wreath
    • Jesse Tree
    • The Creche
    • December 3 St. Francis Xavier
    • December 5 St. Nicholas
    • December 7 St. Ambrose
    • December 8 Immaculate Conception
    • December 9 St. Juan Diego
    • December 12 Our Lady of Guadalupe
    • December 13 St. Lucy
    • December 14 St. John of the Cross
    • Posada
    • O Antiphons
  • Christmas
  • January
    • January 1 Mary Mother of God
    • January 4 St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
    • Epiphany
    • Baptism of Our Lord
    • January 21 St. Agnes
    • January 22 Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of the Unborn Child
    • January 28 St. Thomas Aquinas
    • January 31 St. John Bosco
    • Superbowl Sunday
  • February
    • February 2 Presentation
    • February 3 St. Blaise
    • February 6 St. Paul Miki
    • February 10 St. Scholastica
    • February 11 Our Lady of Lourdes
    • February 14 St. Valentine
    • February 22 Chair of St. Peter
  • March
    • March 3 St. Katharine Drexel
    • March 7 Sts. Perpetua and Felicity
    • March 9 St. Frances of Rome
    • March 17 St. Patrick
    • March 19 St. Joseph
    • March 25 Annunciation
  • Mardi Gras
  • Ash Wednesday
  • Lent
Something to do for St. John De Brebeuf and St. Isaac Jogues:

Tell this  story.It is best told after dinner since it contains some gruesome details.It is told from Mary Reed Newland’s book, The Saints and Our Children.

Here is a story to remember when one is tempted to sin with his hands. Directions:Isaac Jogues was one of the French Jesuits who came from France in the seventeenth century to bring the gift of Baptism and the Faith to the Indians in the New World. It would be hard to find in all the lives of the saints a story more filled with danger, terror and blazing love than that of these Jesuits. Men ofrefinement from gracious homes and loving families, who entered religion and lived surrounded by the love and the regard of their brother priests, they left all for a life of utter deprivation that was harder than their wildest imaginings. The people they had come to serve were truly savage. Suspicious, crafty, cruel, unclean, coarse, impure, accustomed to the most primitive ways, these children of the One God worshipped many gods and offered them many things in sacrifice, including the flesh of their enemies which these Indians often ate. To such people the Jesuits adapted themselves, gave themselves. Nothing in the lives of the early martyrs of the Church surpasses these modern martyrs. Their story is a must for every boy and girl, mother and father. It is a tale of how men are supposed to love — as their Master loves — to the last drop of blood and the last shred of flesh.

The plague of the French settlements on the St. Lawrence and of the Jesuits working among the Hurons was the Iroquois, the five nations of Indians below the St. Lawrence occupying what is now part of New York State. Among these tribes the Mohawks were the most fierce and their avowed determination to wipe the Hurons from the face of the earth kept them constantly on the warpath, harassing both their enemy and their enemy's French friends.

On the morning of August 2, 1642, a party including Father Isaac Jogues, René Goupil, William Couture, several Christian Hurons and others, forty in all, were ambushed and captured. The Mohawks did them unspeakable violence. It is hard to imagine that ever in the history of mankind have there been blood baths worse than these. The torture march took them mile after mile, sometimes on foot, sometimes cramped in canoes, bleeding, infected, feverish, set upon wildly at the nightly encampments and dragged about by the hair, the beard, pinched, plucked, probed, pierced for the delight it afforded their captors. Entering encampments and villages, they were forced to run the gauntlet, climb the torture platforms, endure the same outrages repeated for the amusement it afforded the villagers. At night they were tied to the ground, their hands and feet staked, andleft for whatever torments the women and children devised. It amused the Indians to sprinkle hot coals on the prisoners' bodies and wait to see if the captives would betray their pain. Years of hardening in the forests, enduring the fierce Canadian winters, living with the minimum of shelter, clothing and accommodation had seasoned and tried the fortitude of the Indians. Love of God accounted for the fortitude of the priests. They knew the worst lay ahead of them with their arrival at the village of their captors where they would again be tortured and at last, Perhaps, mercifully meet death.

The day came. Hideously "embraced" by the villagers who met them at the bank of the river, they were marched across a ford and herded into a field. The Mohawks solemnly offered thanksgiving to the sun and to the war demons who had delivered the French and the Hurons into their hands to be roasted and eaten. Next the prisoners were forced to run the gauntlet: William Couture the catechist was first, then the Christian Hurons, followed by René Goupil, more Hurons, and last of all the prize, the hated blackrobe Ondessonk — IsaacJogues. The assaults were unbelievable. Jogues reached the end of the gauntlet to find his comrades "a bleeding pile of bodies. . . . Worst of all was Goupil. His face and head were smeared over with blood, so that there was left no white except that of his eyes. His features were smashed and swollen. . . . So pitiable was his condition, that he would have inspired compassion in cruelty itself. I found him all the more beautiful as he had more in common with Him who, bearing a face most worthy of the admiration and delight of angels, appeared tous, in the midst of His anguish, like unto a leper."

Next they were made to ascend the platform. Again they were beaten, cut, the skin of their fingers slit; then an old man, a sorcerer, ascended the platform dragging after him an Algonquin squaw named Joan who was known to be a Christian. He drove the others off and gnashed the fingers of Ondessonk in his teeth. "I hate this one most of all," he cried, and he ordered the Algonquin woman to cut off the left thumb. She shrank away, horrified. She loved the Blackrobes and their God, but the old man and the braves hedged her about, threatening to kill her if she delayed. Finally she took the knife and shaking with fright and terror horribly hacked off his thumb. He endured it silently. He saw his thumb lying at his feet where the woman had dropped it.

"Picking up the severed thumb with my right hand, I offered it to You, my living and my true God, for I remembered the Holy Sacrifices which I had offered to You upon the altars of your Church through seven years. I accepted this torture, O my God, as a loving vengeance for want of love and respect that I had shown in touching Your Holy Body . . ." 

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