St. Isaac Jogues (1607-1646), French Jesuit priest and martyr, was a missionary among the North American Indians.

Isaac Jogues was born in Orléans. He entered the Jesuit novitiate at 17 and became a priest in 1636. He went immediately to Canada as a missionary and from Quebec was sent to the Huron Missions on Georgian Bay. Later he proselytized among the so-called Tobacco Nation (the Petuns) south of the Hurons but failed to make any religious impression on them.

In 1642 Jogues returned to Quebec. In August he left again for the Georgian Missions with a party of Hurons and two French lay missionaries. At Lake Saint Peter they were attacked and captured by an Iroquois war party, which took them south to the Iroquois villages in present-day New York State. All underwent torture on the way; Jogues had his hands mutilated and fire applied to his body; he...