“With the gift of fortitude/courage, we overcome our fear and are willing to take risks as a follower of Jesus Christ. A person with courage is willing to stand up for what is right in the sight of God, even if it means accepting rejection, verbal abuse, or even physical harm and death.” St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Issac Jogues, SJ is a huge witness of fortitude in his quest to evangelize the native Indians.
“At the southern end of Lake Champlain is a small island, now called Jogues Island, which is believed to have been the scene of barbarous cruelties inflicted on the prisoners. Jogues wrote: ‘We were made to go up from the shore between two lines of Indians who were armed with clubs, sticks, and knives. I was the last and blows were showered on me. I fell on the ground and thought my end had come, but they lifted me up all streaming with blood and carried me more dead than alive to the platform.’ Worse tortures followed. The Iroquois were especially cruel to the Huron converts. At this time and during subsequent torturing Father Jogues suffered the loss of two fingers.
Jogues’ slavery lasted for more than a year. His record of it, written for his Superior, has been studied by scholars who are amazed at his endurance. ‘He would sometimes escape,’ Parkman wrote, ‘. . . and wander in the forest, telling his beads and repeating passages of Scripture. In a remote and lonely spot he cut the bark in the form of a cross from the trunk of a great tree; and here he made his prayers. This living martyr, half clad in shaggy furs, kneeling in the snow among the icicled rocks and beneath the gloomy pines, bowing in adoration before the emblem of his faith in which was his only consolation and his only hope, is alike a theme for the pen and a subject for the pencil.'”
