Memorial of Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, Priests, and Companions,Martyrs

What is Daily Mass Readings with Homily and Saint of the Day?

Hear the Mass readings of the day, followed by a homily grounded in the writings of the Church Fathers, Doctors, and master theologians. Every episode concludes with a brief reflection on the heroic virtue of the Saint of the Day and a practical spiritual resolution to carry into your daily life.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is October the nineteenth, the Memorial of Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, Priests, and Companions, Martyrs. These men poured out their lives into a wilderness, holding nothing back, possessing nothing but Christ — and so they possessed everything. Let their blood-soaked witness instruct us as we hear God's word this day.

A reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Ephesians.

Brothers and sisters: You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you once lived following the age of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the desires of our flesh, following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ — by grace you have been saved — raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast. For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.

The word of the Lord.

A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke.

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me." He replied to him, "Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?" Then he said to the crowd, "Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one's life does not consist of possessions." Then he told them a parable. "There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, 'What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?' And he said, 'This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, "Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!"' But God said to him, 'You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?' Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God."

The Gospel of the Lord.

The fool in today's parable did not lose his soul because he was prosperous. He lost it because he spoke only to himself. Count the pronouns in our Lord's telling of this story: my harvest, my barns, my grain, my goods, myself. The man's interior monologue is a sealed chamber — God is not in it, neighbor is not in it, eternity is not in it. He has become the very image of the disordered soul Saint Paul describes in the opening of his letter to the Ephesians: a man following the ruler of the power of the air, enslaved to the impulses of the flesh, functionally dead while appearing very much alive.

Saint Augustine, meditating on this parable, observes that the rich man's real poverty was a poverty of desire — he desired only what could be stored, measured, and consumed. He had trained his soul to want nothing beyond what time could provide. And this, Augustine insists, is the very structure of sin: to love finite things with an infinite appetite, to give the whole of the heart to what cannot bear the weight of it. The barn is not condemned; the harvest is not condemned. What is condemned is the soul that has collapsed inward upon itself, severed from God and severed from the demands of charity.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his treatment of covetousness in the Summa, identifies its deepest malice not merely in the hoarding of goods but in the disordering of the will that such hoarding perfects over time. Each successive act of grasping re-trains the interior faculty of love to seek security in created things rather than in the Creator. The rich fool did not wake up one morning a fool. He became one, slowly, by a thousand small decisions to enlarge the barn rather than the soul.

Now set against this man the men we honor today: John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, and their companions. Where the rich fool built ever-larger barns to insulate himself from contingency, these Jesuit missionaries crossed an ocean to embrace contingency absolutely. They entered the forests of New France with nothing that could be stored. They endured starvation, torture, and captivity. Isaac Jogues had his fingers mutilated by the Iroquois, and when he returned to France, Pope Urban VIII granted him special dispensation to celebrate Mass with those broken hands, saying: it would be unjust to prevent a martyr of Christ from drinking the blood of Christ. He then went back. He went back. This is a man who was not rich in possessions and was immeasurably rich in what matters to God.

This is the living exegesis of Paul's great declaration: we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared in advance. The North American Martyrs did not invent their mission through ambition or program. They walked into the good works God had prepared for them from before the foundation of the world — works that looked, from the outside, like destruction, like failure, like the tearing down of every barn a man might build for his own comfort.

Cornelius a Lapide, commenting on this passage of Ephesians, draws our attention to the word handiwork — in the Greek, poiema, from which we derive the word poem. We are God's poem, his crafted utterance. A poem is not made for the poem's own sake; it is made to express something beyond itself, to communicate a meaning that exceeds its own letters. The rich fool tried to become his own author. The martyrs surrendered authorship entirely — and became, in their very deaths, the most eloquent verses God ever wrote in the wilderness of this world.

John de Brébeuf arrived in New France in 1625, a man of extraordinary physical stature and spiritual iron. He learned the Huron language with such mastery that he composed a Christmas carol in it — the Huron Carol, still sung today — because he understood that the Incarnation must be spoken in the tongue of the people it saves. He lived among the Huron for years, suffering the worst conditions a human body can endure, and he did so with a documented serenity that his companions found inexplicable by natural means alone.

Isaac Jogues came later, younger, and suffered sooner. Captured by the Mohawk, he watched his companions be killed, endured systematic torture, and was enslaved for over a year before a Dutch rescue. When he returned to the missions and was eventually martyred in 1646 — killed with a tomahawk, his head placed on the palisade — he was forty-two years old. He had spent the better part of his priestly life giving away what he never had much of to begin with.

Their companions — René Goupil, Jean de Lalande, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, Noel Chabanel, and Anthony Daniel — each died for the same reason: they had taken Paul's words to absolute seriousness. By grace they had been saved, and that grace was not a passive possession. It was a fire that sent them outward, always outward, until there was nothing left to give but their lives.

Today, guard what you speak to yourself in the interior monologue of your heart. When you hear the voice that catalogues what you own, what you've secured, what you've stored — interrupt it. Deliberately name one person beyond yourself to whom you owe an act of generosity this week, and do it without waiting for the perfect moment. The martyrs never had a perfect moment. They had grace, and they spent it.

May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. Amen.
EPISODE_TITLE: Rich In What Matters To God
IMAGE_PROMPT: A Jesuit priest in worn black cassock kneels in prayer amid a snow-dusted northern forest, hands raised in offering, a faint golden light descending through bare branches above him, evoking both martyrdom and divine grace.