book reviews 215

Timothy G. Pearson Becoming Holy in Early Canada [McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion 70]. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal/London 2014, xvii + 295 pp. isbn 9780773544192. £21.99; cnd$32.95.

The prerequisites that made it possible for the Catholic Church to proclaim a person a saint and a martyr were defined by the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Normally, a candidate for sainthood must go through a process of canonization that includes several stages—Servant of God, Venerable, Blessed, and, eventu- ally, Saint. Martyrdom was a special category that described men and women who sacrificed their life for the Faith before a persecutor whose main motiva- tion was hate of the martyr’s Faith. In its mandate, the Sacred Congregation of the Rites, established in 1588, included the verification of all prerequisites for sainthood and martyrdom and the process of canonization. In early Canada, an area that Canadian historian Timothy G. Pearson’s book describes as the Saint Lawrence Valley and neighbouring missions from 1607 to roughly 1763, 38 persons—23 men and fifteen women, including eleven Natives—were recognized by their community as saintly persons—or “holy persons,” as Pearson defines them. However, the Church canonized only twelve of them. Eight of these are also officially described as martyrs. (The latter are all Jesuits and are now popularly known as “Canadian Martyrs.”) The last two Canadian saints were officially proclaimed as late as 3 April 2014, when Pope Francis i bypassed the usual canonization process and declared the offi- cial sainthood of Marie Guyart-Martin, an Ursuline nun known in religion as Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672), and of François de Laval, vicar apostolic in Canada and then first bishop of Québec (1623–1708). The difference between “the process of becoming holy” (p. 6) and a holy person’s recognition by his or her community and later by the official Church is at the core of this book. Indeed, Canadian holy persons must perform their holy acts according to a well-established tradition of sanctity that went back to ancient Rome and found their contemporary counterparts in the Far East or in sixteenth-century Europe. But that was not enough, Pearson explains. The likes of Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, the foundress of the Congrégation de Notre- Dame (1620–1700) and Saint and Martyr Jean de Brébeuf (1593–1649), must also be viewed to perform as a holy person by their local community. Its members must believe that they have been living with or have been close to a very special person who at some point will achieve sainthood and join the celebrated saints of the Catholic pantheon. The topic of sainthood in a colonial context is not new—Dominique Des- landres’s earliest article on Marie de l’Incarnation goes back to 1985—and is

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09601021 216 book reviews certainly not limited to New France, witness the most recent spate of articles on Spanish America by Cornelius Conover (2010), David A. Boruchoff (2014), and Asunción Lavrin (2014). What makes Becoming Holy in Early Canada a most original and innovative book, is Pearson’s ability to weave into his topic the holy person’s performance, its immediate reception by the community, and the creation of an institutional memory in the form of a hagiographi- cal text that made it possible, in later times, to go all the way to canoniza- tion. Far from being a list of holy biographies, the author tests his hypothesis around some chosen “holy persons,” well known as they are to historians of New France and of its church. Here are another four women of French descent, Jeanne Mance, a lay dévote (1606–1673); Marie-Catherine de Simon de Long- pré, in religion Catherine de Saint-Augustin, an Augustinian sister (1632–1668); Jeanne Le Ber, the recluse nun (1662–1714); and Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais, known as Marguerite d’Youville, founder of the Soeurs de la Cha- rité de l’Hôpital-Général de Montréal, known as Soeurs Grises (1701–1777). There is also a Franciscan Recollet lay brother, Claude Pelletier, in religion Didace (1657–1699), and two Natives—a man, the Algonquin convert and mar- tyr Onoharé (rechristened Joseph, d. 1650), and a woman, the famous Mohawk Saint, Tekakwitha (rechristened Kateri, 1656–1680), the latter canonized as late as 21 October 2012. With regard to Onoharé and Tekakwitha, one wonders why Native saints and martyrs were not more numerous, given the number that came to regard themselves as Christians and paid a very high personal price for it. Pearson touches on the topic (p. 63) but stops shy of opening up a page that would need another book, possibly of the comparative sort. Suffice it to recall that the first Mexican martyrs were three Native children, killed by their parents for having become Christians; and that in 1626, that is, concomitantly with the very early phase of Canada’s history, Pope Urban viii beatified Felipe de Jesús (1572–1596), a Mexico-born Franciscan who had been executed in Nagasaki, Japan, together with 25 of his companions. (Felipe de Jesús was canonized by Pope Pius ix in 1862.) In order to be recognized as holy, first of all these very special persons needed what Pearson terms “performance.” They had to act as holy persons—through ascetism, personal exertion, heroic deeds in conjunction with the pagans, assis- tance to the poor and the ill, establishment of religious congregations, fundrais- ing for holy purposes, performing miracles, etc. For any of these reasons, they had to be regarded as “holy persons” by the community that surrounded them or, after their death, knew of them through word of mouth and public fame. These persons, according to Pearson, were “the informal religious heroes of

Church History and Religious Culture 96 (2016) 179–234