Parish organizations in the GTA come together to restore St. Marie Among The Hurons
TORONTO – Ahh… Truth and Reconciliation… the endless atonement for our earthly shortcomings. Not to make light of contemporary politics, there are serious events that celebrate the complex intermingling of peoples, races and cultures. The latter are not always associated with antiseptic, quite the contrary.
I come from a land about thirty percent the size of Ontario. Over three thousand years, “uninvited guests” (from Celts, Slavs, Goths, Ostrogoth, Visigoths, Huns, Greeks, Phoenicians, Arabs, Angevins, Burgundians, Gauls, Franks… the list is interminable) made Italy their home, just as “Italians” felt it was their divine mission to visit everywhere, and to imbibe in the local culture – “paese che vai, usanza che trovi”. Everyone became enhanced as a result.
We find this mixing and exchanges of cultures even in the vast forests of Ontario in the mid sixteen hundreds. Mostly the adventurersome were stimulated by religious zealotry or avaricious desire to capitalize on what the First Nations claimed as their own, even if there was no hegemony among them, no organized authority to organize resistance or negotiate accommodations. “Settlers from Europe” found themselves in a “brutal crossfire” that did not believe in the concept of taking prisoners.
One such location was modern day Huronia, in Midland Ontario, a few hours drive north of Toronto. It was an ambitious project by Jesuits to bring two cultures, their values and expertise together. It seemed to work, for a while.
It attracted academically oriented men with an insatiable curiosity (Jesuits were nothing if not that) who were fascinated by the peoples who thrived in an environment that the Philosophe Voltaire famously referred to as quelques arpants de neige.
Unfortunately, those Jesuits got caught up in the wars between two federation s of competing Aboriginal Alliances: Hurons and Iroquois. The project, Ste. Marie Among the Hurons, became victim to an exterminating bloodbath. A Jesuit, Father Francois Bressani, barely made it out alive, thanks to the Iroquois raiding party that ambushed him and his small group, tortured him, sold him into slavery to the Dutch, who shuffled him off to France.
Theirs is a fascinating story. We can retell it, in part, because the desire of the priests from five parishes in the GTA who have begun a multi group effort to restore the infrastructure and history of those Aboriginals and Jesuits who did believe in the concept of goodwill.
Last Thursday’s banquet was but one initiative to keep the drive alive among a disparate group that connects First Nations and Catholics from Italian, Filippino, Polish, Tamil and Vietnamese communities.
Corriere is proud to support them.
Here below is a photogallery of the event (pics by Ava Baccari)
