| Popis: |
Seventy-five years after the approval of the Society of Jesus by Pope Paul III in 1540 and fifty-five years after the death of its founder, Ignatius Loyola, the French Jesuit priests Pierre Biard (1567-1622) and Ennemond Masse (1575-1646) set foot in New France at Port Royal, 22 May 1601. “It is according to our divine calling,” Ignatius Loyola hadwritten, “to travel to various places and to live in any part of the world where there is hope of God's greater service and the help of souls”; and in New France these “Blackrobes,” as they were soon affectionately called, immediately began to reach out to the aboriginal peoples of the vast new land. They went first to a band of Mi'kmaq living nearby whose chief Membertou had been baptized thirteen months earlier by Jesse Fleche, a diocesan priest accompanying a small expedition sponsored by the governor of Acadia. Membertou and his family were the first aboriginal people to receive solemn baptism in New France. Two years later the two Jesuit priests, having been taken prisoner by the English, were returned to France. In the long run, this first Jesuit mission, despite its short duration, would, in its frequent recounting, inspire many vocations among the students of the Jesuit colleges in France. Jesuits returned to New France in 1625, this time to the settlement founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain at Quebec, whose population numbered only around seventy. Three priests, Ennemond Masse again, Charles Lalemant (1587-1674), and Jean de Brebeuf (1593-1649), as well as two Jesuit brothers, Francois Charton (1593-1657) and Gilbert Burel (1585-1661), landed there on 15 June 1625. |
