St. René Goupil

St. René Goupil was born on 15 May 1608 at Anjou in France. He had sought to enter the Society of Jesus but was turned away because of ill health and partial deafness, and instead trained as a surgeon. Longing still to serve, he offered himself as a donné, a lay volunteer, to the Jesuit missions of New France, where he cared for the sick with skill and devotion.

In 1642 he was captured together with St. Isaac Jogues by a Mohawk war party and subjected to torture and enslavement. Shortly before his death he pronounced his vows as a Jesuit into the hands of Jogues, and he was killed with a tomahawk on 29 September 1642 at Ossernenon in present-day New York, struck down for making the sign of the cross over a native child. He was thus the first of the eight North American Martyrs to die. Canonized in 1930, he is celebrated on 19 October.