Cult of the American Martyrs

My most vivid recollection from Blessed Sacrament School in Trenton, N.J., other than our eighth-grade Franciscan nun chewing us out, is the poster of a cluster of men in black robes, up front between the blackboard and the window. They were, of course, St. Isaac Jogues and his companions, and we had been inspired to admire them for their horrible deaths -- beat bloody in a naked run through the gauntlet, tortured, burned alive, fingers chewed off, hacked in the head with a tomahawk -- at the hands of savages they had come to "save."

When we were old enough to read, the delight was Jesuit Fr. Francis X. Talbot's classic Saint Among Savages on Jogues and his Saint Among the Hurons on Jean de Brébeuf. Talbot's blood-splattered pages put flesh on the ghosts of the so-called "first American saints." The mythology was in tune with the pop culture of our Saturday afternoon Westerns, where screaming "savages" galloped around the circled wagon trains, shooting their flaming arrows until the distant bugle announced the arrival of the U.S. cavalry.