Saint Jean de Lalande

Saint Jean de Lalande (c.1623-1646) was a French lay missionary and martyr, one of the eight North American Martyrs and, with Saint Isaac Jogues and Saint René Goupil, one of the three who died on what is now United States soil. Born in Dieppe, Normandy, he crossed to New France around 1642 and served the Jesuit missions as a donné: a lay "given man" bound to the missionaries by contract rather than vows, doing the missions' manual work of building, fishing, tending the sick, and assisting the priests, attached to the Jesuits' Trois-Rivières residence.

In September 1646 Father Isaac Jogues, who had already been captured, mutilated, and enslaved by the Mohawks in 1642, set out from Quebec on a peace mission to Iroquois country. Lalande volunteered to accompany him. When most of their Huron companions turned back amid rumors of Mohawk hostility, Lalande continued; the Jesuit chronicler Bressani wrote that the desire of serving God was leading him into a country where he surely expected to meet death. The party was seized by a Mohawk war party and brought to Ossernenon, above the Mohawk River in present-day upstate New York. Members of the Bear clan, blaming Jogues' presence for crop failure and epidemic, killed Jogues with a hatchet blow on 18 October 1646; Lalande was killed the next day, by most accounts as he tried to recover Father Jogues' body. Both men were beheaded, their heads set on the palisade and their bodies cast into the Mohawk River.

Lalande was beatified with the other North American Martyrs by Pope Pius XI on 21 June 1925 and canonized by the same pope on 29 June 1930. His feast is kept on 19 October in the United States and 26 September in Canada. The site of his martyrdom is today the National Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs at Auriesville, New York, also the birthplace, ten years after the martyrdoms, of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.