How long has it been since I have written about a saint, any saint, in SQD? A very long time, and while there are some of my readers who have perhaps not bemoaned this hiatus, and while perhaps not a single one of you has woken in the middle of the night with a craving for a hagiographic tidbit, I am going to plunge back into the haloed fray.
This has nothing to do with the fact that on Sunday (21st) the Pope will canonize 6, or 7, depending on your source, new saints, thus rendering my compendious Lives of the Saints even more out-of-date than it already is.
It has more to do with the fact that today is the feast of René Goupil, a deaf French Jesuit who came to North America in 1639 to missionize among the Hurons, a group not known for their fondness for missionaries. However, it was the Iroquois, fierce enemies of the Hurons, who killed Goupil. The method was a tomahawk to the head, and on account of that dispatchment, he is the patron saint of anesthesiologists as well as patients who receive anesthesia.
This remarkable – is it literal or magical? – linkage-giving-rise-to-patronage made me want to suggest a patronage group for another of today’s saints: Peter of Alcantara. He was a 16th century Spanish friar and until today’s exciting discovery, I only knew him as a friend and mentor of Teresa of Avila. Early in his monkish career, Peter was put in charge of the refectory at his monastery. After six months of his regime, the other monks finally complained that they had not been given one piece of fruit in all that time. Peter replied that he hadn’t seen any fruit. A fellow monk directed his eyes just slightly upward, and there were grapes and apples and figs hanging in profusion.
Peter’s taste buds had not felt the lack. Monks, as we all know, have a great sense of humor, and once for fun they gave Peter a bowl of water with vinegar and salt and told him it was soup. He never knew the difference.
Based on this story, I am recommending to the Vatican that Peter be made the patron saint of school cafeteria workers who, no doubt, need all the help they can get.
St Frideswide, an 8th century virgin, is the patron saint of Oxford, England, but that is never here nor there. Her story gets interesting about 500 years after her death, when England was in the throes of reformist zeal. For those hundreds of years, Frideswide’s relics had been resting undisturbed in Oxford. Then in 1561 came Calfhill, of whom even the laconic Alban Butler writes: “[he]went to such trouble to desecrate them [Frideswide’s bones] that it would seem he must have been insane with fanaticism.” For the purposes of his nefarious desecration, Calfhill dug up the bones of an apostate nun (She had married a friar) and mixed them up with the bones of the virginal Frideswide, and then reburied the mélange back in the church.
This performance piece was written up in Latin and German, and given the rubric: “Here lies Religion with Superstition.” History does not tell us what Calfhill did with the rest of his life, nor the manner of his death.

I am here in gorgeous Georgian Bay, at Belle au Clair beach in the Township of Tiny, which is named for one of the dogs of Lady Sarah Maitland, the tall, red-haired asthmatic wife of the Governor-General. Neighboring townships are named for her other dogs, Tay and Floss. There is a traditional prayer recited by the locals on Canada Day, expressing gratitude that her dogs were not called Spike, Killer and Vicious.

At Belle au Clair beach, stately pines stand erect at the point where the white sand dunes meet the sandy soil that loves oaks, and the water is tropically warm on account of the shallowness of Lake Huron, but in order to connect to Wi-Fi I have bicycled three relatively flat miles to the Tiny Fire Station in Lafontaine which is not named for the author of the fable of the Bees and the Hornets.
From the cottage at Belle-au-Clair to this Fire Station is exactly 1/200th the distance traveled by the intrepid Father Jean Brebeuf, the Jesuit missionary, ‘Apostle to the Hurons’, who paddled and portaged from Trois Rivières in Quebec to the Huron Country around Georgian Bay.
This tubercular but determined young man arrived in Canada in 1625. At that time, the Hurons were engaged in friendly trading with the French; all the while warring with their traditional enemies, the Iroquois. Brebeuf set out to learn the Huron language and wrote the first French-Huron Dictionary, which includes seven different words for bear, to distinguish the age and temperament of the bear in question, as well as a 23-letter word for “a splay-footed female who used to be my wife”. By 1647 Brebeuf had managed to convert thousands of Hurons from their heathen ways to the rituals of Christianity. He even composed a Huron Christmas Carol, in which the friendly Indian Christmas tree is an eerie foreshadowing of the clear cutting of their vast pine forests. The denuded lands were later replanted and reinvented as Christmas tree farms, and this leads us directly to the fact that every December a Quebecois, hawking his hewn conifers, inhabits every street corner in Manhattan.
But this happy state of affairs (caroling Hurons living in harmony with bilingual frog-eating blackrobes) could not last forever. By 1648 the Iroquois were winning the war with the Hurons, and in 1649 Jean de Brebeuf and another Jesuit were captured and tortured to death. It was said that the Iroquois were so impressed by his courage under duress that they cut out his heart and drank his blood, in order to ingest his strength. The Iroquois may have remained adamantly unconverted, but apparently they had their own form of communion.
A few days later his body was recovered, and some forward-thinking Hurons – anticipating Brebeuf’s canonization as well as the touristic value of his bones – boiled his body with lye and gathered his bones as relics.
And that is how Jean Brebeuf’s skull came to reside in a gold Gothic reliquary at the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario where I dragged my three friends, a former Christian Scientist, an Anglican and an atheist, for all of whom this Papist relic-worshipping is anathema.
Actually, it only the left half of his skull that inhabits Martyrs’ Shrine. Was this decided because that part of the skull encased the left brain that enabled Brebeuf to learn several Native American languages? Not that fluency in their tongue stopped the Iroquois from hanging red-hot tomahawks around his neck.
And where is his right skull?

A Klondike bar would have been perfect after viewing the skull of Brebeuf, but sadly The Martyrs’ Shrine Café was closed. Nous etions desolées. Imagine the menu possibilities.