A house of Evangelism

In 1635, the house of Notre-Dame-des-Anges was the only rightful Jesuit property in the colony. Its superior, Father Lejeune, planned to turn it into a college to educate children of the French, a seminary to evangelize young Amerindians, and a central house to support the missions. Only the seminary will be carried out, at the location of the actual Cartier-Brébeuf National Historic Site.

A hut will be built and used as a center to convert the Natives. To their sayings, this hut was “a bad slum of botched boards and slats of forty French feet long and twenty-five feet wide”. An adjacent building served as a barn. In 1634, according to Father Lejeune, the seminary had four lower rooms, a chapel, a refectory where they slept, a kitchen and a spare room. Two additional rooms of smaller dimensions could accommodate up to six persons. Other guests could sleep in the attic.

So the Jesuit main residence housed the Huron's seminary from 1636 to 1639. However, this institution only lasted three years. Over this period, ten Huron attended school. Among this group of nine teenagers and one adult, five went back to Huronia, two died soon upon arrival and one, the adult, drowned. After two years, only two returned and five were baptized. The natives would pray, read, write and study the catechism in the morning and fish, hunt and make bows and arrows in the afternoon. The Jesuits initial plan was to select the best candidates in each native villages, form them for four to five years then sent them back home to teach the new faith. After three years, this experience was a failure, mainly because the natives recruited showed little interest and left sooner than expected. The Jesuits abandoned the seminary in 1639 and moved in the Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance presbytery, in Quebec City.

The Jesuit father's plans called for selecting the best Aboriginal candidates and training them for four to five years before allowing them to return to their communities, where they would spread their religious knowledge. The experiment, which lasted approximately three years, proved a failure because the recruits showed little interest in their education and stayed for a much shorter period than planned. The seminary was abandoned around 1639, the year when the Jesuits relocated to the Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance presbytery in Québec.