Holy Cross Addresses History of Jesuit Martyrdom

WORCESTER, Mass. – Michael Pasquier, assistant professor of religious studies at Louisiana State University, will present “The Many Meanings of Martyrdom: Jesuit Missionaries and Their Encounter with Native America” on Thursday Oct. 22 at 4:30 p.m. in Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. His presentation is part of Jesuit Heritage 2009, which offers opportunities for the Holy Cross community to reflect on what martyrdom means—20 years after the murders in El Salvador of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter.  The event is free and open to the public.

Pasquier will explore the many ways that the Jesuit missionaries saw martyrdom in Native America.  Using textual and visual sources, Pasquier will prove that it is possible to recognize how difficult, yet essential, it was for many Jesuits to depict themselves as suffering servants of the church and saintly models for the next generation of missionaries.

“However, the heroic representations of martyrdom represent only a fragment of the story about the Jesuit encounter with native peoples of colonial America,” Pasquier says.

Pasquier will explain how the concept of martyrdom reshaped the Jesuits’ attitudes toward suffering, sacrifice, holiness, and sainthood. Pasquier says martyrdom meant many things to many Jesuits, and those many meanings have continued to influence ideas about missionary work into the 21st century.

Pasquier’s research focuses on the history of Roman Catholicism in the American South, Catholic devotional culture, and religion in colonial Louisiana. He is a contributing editor to the blog Religion in American History and has a forthcoming book titled French missionary priests and frontier Catholicism in the United States.