Our Snowshoe Saint

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As the story goes, in 1846, Father Frederic Baraga on Madeline Island heard word that the Ojibwe community at Grand Portage (in today’s Minnesota) was in the midst of an epidemic and needed aid. With no roads cut along the edges of the Sawtooth Mountains, the overland journey would be more than 200 miles and likely a month or more of travel.

Across Lake Superior, however, there would be only 40 miles to traverse in less than a day. Baraga enlisted the paddling help of a local Ojibwe man, Louis Goudin, and they launched Goudin’s 18-foot canoe from Sand Island toward the Minnesota shore. Soon, a storm arose. For several hours, Goudin paddled frantically while Baraga prayed for safe passage. Eventually a craggy, almost frightening shore appeared before them with no place to land. Louis hesitated, but the priest directed him: “We will be saved. Go straight on.” And suddenly ahead could be seen a small, calm river.

They landed safely, built a wooden cross to praise God for keeping them from drowning, and went on to Grand Portage, apparently helping the community – though that part of the story is more vague. The river, now a character itself in their story, became the Cross River, flowing into Lake Superior near Schroeder.

By the standard of anyone familiar with a Lake Superior storm, this crossing in a birchbark canoe was something of a miracle … but not the kind of miracle needed today for the man who traveled nearly 38 years as a frontier missionary, mainly around the southern shores of the Big Lake, and served as first bishop for the Marquette Diocese in Michigan.

Today two miracles are needed to help complete an effort, under way for more than six decades, to have Bishop Baraga (bear-ah-ga) recognized as a saint, and this year, as the region’s Catholic churches celebrate 150 years since his death, the process toward sainthood moves slowly forward.

Every saint starts out as a mortal, even ordinary, human. So how does one go from normal person to verified saint? Within the Catholic Church, there is a strictly designated, and often long, path to sainthood. For those working to make that happen for Baraga, our famed “Snowshoe Priest,” the journey may seem longer than any of the hundreds of miles the man traveled across our winter landscapes.

Frederic (or Frederik) Baraga started life born in a castle on June 29, 1797, in northwestern Slovenia, the country bordering Austria, Croatia and Italy.

Orphaned at 15, he went on to study law, but became a priest. After a month of sea travel, he arrived in New York on December 31, 1830, to start four decades of ministering first beside Lake Michigan, but mainly along Lake Superior. He arrived at La Pointe on Madeline Island in July 1835 and within seven days directed the building of a log church there.

He founded missions from the western to eastern tips of Lake Superior, including the Duluth district diocese. Eventually he was named to head the diocese out of Sault Ste. Marie, which he later moved to Marquette.

Baraga made occasional trips back to Europe to solicit funds and priests. In 1836 while in Europe, he had a prayer book printed in Ojibwe and Ottawa and presented a copy to Pope Pius IX. For short time, Antonia, one of his two sisters, returned with him to run a school at La Pointe, but she could not endure the rigors of frontier life.

A master of linguistics, Baraga was fluent in eight languages, including Ottawa and Ojibwe, and he created the Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language. “This language is spoken by the Chippewa Indians, as also by the Otawas, Potawatamis and Algonquins, with little difference,” he wrote, providing the dictionary “for the use of missionaries, and other persons living among the above mentioned Indians.”

Baraga served the Native population, moving from La Pointe to L’Anse, Michigan, in 1843, and then worked also with the newly arriving immigrants heading to the copper and iron mines in the Upper Peninsula.

In recent years, his legacy can evoke mixed responses from some Native people, especially younger generations, but Curtis Chambers, former tribal chairman of the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians near Cheboygan, Michigan, has no doubt about Baraga’s commitment to those who were his main mission. Baraga used his legal background, for instance, to keep Native people from being displaced under the 1830 Removal Act. “He saved us from Andrew Jackson,” Curtis says. “The man was a genius … spiritually gifted.”

Baraga was fierce in coverage of his vast mission territory, traveling hundreds of miles every year by water, on foot and, most famously, by snowshoe in winter. The evolving frontier made for harrowing travel.

“Baraga was a minimalist who carried very little with him in ways of supplies …often only putting a potato or two in the pocket of his cloak for his meals while traveling,” says Lenora McKeen, current director of the Bishop Baraga Association.

Curtis is well attuned to those miles. A devout Catholic, he’s retracing Baraga’s snowshoe routes on foot. Curtis, whose tribe built the first church overseen by Baraga, respects the missionary’s first act on arrival was to learn the Native languages and culture.

Baraga encountered several challenges (including the intentional attempted burning of his home in Michigan).

“So many times his life was spared. He always trusted God when he encountered these perils,”

Lenora says.

 Besides the story of the stormy crossing to Grand Portage, another near disaster came one spring when he and others walked from La Pointe to Ontonagon during spring breakup, as described by the Rev. Glenn Phillips for the Marquette Diocese: “His companions set out with trust in Baraga as he took a direct route. But they became alarmed as in short order they were adrift on a ice floe and a southeast wind steadily pushed them away from the shore. Frederic walked on, singing songs of faith. ‘We will be safe,’ he said. Suddenly the wind shifted and drove them ahead and shoreward. ‘See, we have traveled a great distance and have worked very little.’ And they stepped safely ashore not far from their destination.”

Starting in 1853, he worked from Sault Ste. Marie and Marquette.

At a gathering of bishops in Baltimore in 1866, Baraga suffered one, perhaps two, strokes. Afraid the other bishops would not let him return to Lake Superior, he begged the priest traveling with him to get him home, a monumental task. But he did reach Marquette and lived for two more years, dying January 19, 1868 – 150 years ago.

He was buried at St. Peter’s Cathedral, the twin-spired brownstone church the building of which he had overseen.

Revered even at the time of his death, the city of Marquette declared the day of his funeral Mass, January 30, as a civic day and closed city offices.

The “Shepherd of the Wilderness” continues to inspire reverence, so much so that some 60 years after his passing, another generation would start the process toward sainthood.

The cause for Bishop Baraga’s sainthood officially started in 1952, when Marquette’s eighth bishop, the Rev. Thomas Noa, established the Diocesan Historical Commission to collect documents concerning Baraga’s life and labor. But the movement on Baraga’s behalf started well before that.

In 1929, the All Slovenian Catholic Congress at the Monastery of the Slovenian Franciscan Fathers in Lemont, Illinois, decided to promote the canonization of Bishop Frederic Baraga. “The Fathers have keen interest in the cause because one of their members was recruited by Baraga,” says John Vidmar, deacon at the Slovenian Catholic Mission. The Bishop Baraga Association was founded in 1930.

When the Marquette Diocese took on the canonization project in 1952, it also took over staffing of the association and became its headquarters. In 1954, Joseph Gregorich, a founder of the association, moved from Lemont to Marquette and continued working on the sainthood project until 1970.

“It’s because of Joseph Gregorich’s tireless work and dedication that there is a cause for sainthood,” says Lenora. A chapter of the original group continues in Lemont, and members attend the annual Baraga Days, which this year will be August 18-19 in Marquette.

In 1972, after two decades of gathering materials, the association submitted a written summary of Baraga’s life, work and virtues to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints at the Vatican. The next year, Baraga was declared a “Servant of God,” the first of four steps toward sainthood.

Forty years later, in 2012, Pope Benedict XVI, on the recommendation of the Congregation for the Causes, declared Bishop Frederic Baraga as “Venerable,” the second step in the process. (If this seems a bit lengthy from one step to the next, it helps to know that the Congregation for the Causes of Saints is dealing with 1,500 submissions at any given time.)

In the last two steps, two miracles (or “cures”) attributed to Bishop Baraga must be submitted to the Vatican for verification. The two cannot be submitted simultaneously. First one must be submitted and declared valid, at which point the potential saint is then beatified, or declared blessed. A second cure must occur after his beatification, and the process starts again. Only when two cures are declared genuine miracles is the person declared a saint. These miracles must happen after the person has died (so the miraculous crossing of a stormy Lake Superior would not qualify, no matter what we residents know).

The documentation of the first cure was submitted in 2010. This cure concerns a patient with a liver tumor, cured of the illness after praying to Bishop Baraga and after the Bishop’s stole was placed across the patient’s abdomen. The documentation was reviewed in 2015 by the 3rd Vatican’s medical commission. The commission sought more information, which the Marquette diocese supplied. Final determination is pending.

In 2016, the Pope changed the procedural process for sainthood, and the Vatican now asks those seeking causes to acquire an independent administrator to oversee the submissions and be a contact person.

“It’s a very long process,” says Lenora of the Bishop Baraga Association. “I tell people that it will happen in God’s time; which is not the answer everyone wants to hear, but it’s the truth. We can’t control this.”

The pursuit of sainthood for Bishop Baraga also comes with an earthbound financial cost. “It costs the diocese between $10,000 and $60,000 per year to pursue this,” says Lenora. “These are Rome expenses that we pay, they’re not on our end. There’s really no clear price tag on it, but each cure is thoroughly followed through before starting the next one. It’s so critical that everything is reviewed in its entirety. We don’t want to miss anything, so we need to do our due diligence.”

She and others have no doubt that this man is a saint. “He led a life of heroic virtue from beginning to end.”

So slowly, perhaps as slowly and treacherous as crossing Lake Superior in a storm, the process for Bishop Baraga’s sainthood moves on.

In Baraga’s Footsteps

Only the Vatican can declare him a saint, but Bishop Frederic Baraga has a large non-denominational following of the devoted or the curious and there are many places within the Lake Superior region for pilgrim tourists to encounter the Snowshoe Priest. Perhaps none are quite so impressive as the shrine in L’Anse, Michigan – one of five missions he set up.

“People think that only Catholics are interested in him,” says Nancy Haun, director of the Bishop Baraga Foundation in L’Anse. “That’s a big misconception. Lots of people would like to see him declared a saint.”

The Bishop Baraga Foundation is responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the popular Bishop Baraga Shrine. The grounds of the shrine feature an enormous statue of Bishop Baraga overlooking Keweenaw Bay, as well as a gift shop and landscaped areas for walking and picnicking.

The Bishop Baraga shrine is not a project of the Catholic Church. It’s a community effort conceived in the 1970s, and, Nancy believes, a testament to the bishop’s broad popularity. Residents of Baraga County developed the idea for a shrine, and Bernard Lambert, Baraga county clerk, historian and author, organized the effort.

They hired artist Jack Anderson of Lake Linden, Michigan, whose design was a 35-foot statue of Bishop Baraga standing 25 feet in the air atop laminated beams emanating from five teepees symbolizing the five missions Bishop Baraga founded. (Jack was also the artist who created the 81-foot Iron Man statue at the Discovery Center in Chisholm, Minnesota.)

The land for the shrine, overlooking Keweenaw Bay, was donated by the Patrick Ellico family, the Yalmer Matilla Construction Company in Houghton provided the base. The copper that was turned into brass for the statue came from the White Pine Mine, donated by the Copper Range Mining Company. Free technical assistance was donated by the Upper Peninsula Power Company, and the landscaping design was donated by Evergreen Nurseries in Allegen.

In 1970, Jack and co-sculptor Art Chaput began work on the 60-foot sculptural project. They finished the statue and placed it on its base on June 14, 1972, but the polyurethane insulation inside the statue caught fire as it was being installed. Fifteen months later, once it was repaired, the statue was officially dedicated on September 16, 1973.

Since then the shrine has received hundreds of thousands of visitors. If you’re traveling between Baraga and L’Anse on Highway 41, you can’t miss it, especially because the trees recently were trimmed back from the area, making it fully visible. The enormous statue sits on a bluff overlooking both the road and Lake Superior and is lit at night.

The nonprofit Bishop Baraga Foundation, funded solely through donations, formed after the shrine was completed to care for the statue and grounds. One way the foundation raises money is through the sale of plaques

on-site to memorialize loved ones. People from all over the world have purchased plaques at the shrine, including a Slovenian group.

“So many people are connected to him,” says Nancy, “and this is their way of donating and helping. He was a Catholic bishop, but this shrine is non-denominational – it’s for everyone.”

A gift shop on the grounds of the shrine is owned and run by Missionaries of the Liturgy, a nonprofit group in Iron Mountain.

Servant Maria Volp acts as hostess in the shop from May through October, selling gifts, Catholic materials and snacks (including some days her homemade ice cream), passing out literature and answering questions. While Missionaries of the Liturgy has no direct connection to either the Bishop Baraga Foundation, or Bishop Baraga Association, Maria considers her presence at the shrine in keeping with Baraga’s message to spread God’s word to all. She points out that half the people who take the free prayer booklet and envelope of “goodies” about Bishop Baraga are not Catholic.

“The people who come to the shrine are inclined towards goodness,” says Maria. “They are good-hearted people, and I get to share something beautiful with them.”

If you want to take a tourist pilgrimage of Baraga sites around the Lake, there are many options, including the shrine in L’Anse (see following pages). Here are others:

• The Baraga House in Sault Ste. Marie is where the priest stayed before the seat of the diocese was moved to Marquette. The house was moved from its original site to the city’s “History Row” and is open to the public. St. Mary’s Church (now in its fifth incarnation) was the base for Bishop Baraga before the move. St. Mary’s is the third oldest Catholic parish in the United States.

• The Baraga House, where Baraga stayed in Marquette and where he died, is being developed into the Baraga Education Center and a capital campaign is underway through the Bishop Baraga Association.  

• St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Houghton was dedicated by Baraga in 1859.

• Holy Redeemer Mission Church in Eagle Harbor was built in 1854 on land Frederic Baraga bought in 1852. According to the Marquette Diocese, it’s the oldest of the remaining churches that Baraga had built.

• The organ at St. Mary’s Church in Rockland was purchased by Baraga in 1859.

Baraga Events & Information

• Baraga Days is an annual national event held in different locations. This year, August 18-19, Maquette will host the gathering.

• Reminders of the good bishop abound around our region, including the Michigan county and town named Baraga. A Catholic radio station, Baraga Radio, covers many towns in the southern Upper Peninsula (www.BaragaRadio.com).

• For more on the bishop, contact the Bishop Baraga Association, Marquette, www.dioceseofmarquette.org/bishopbaragaassociation.

Writer Lesley DuTemple has not traveled as many snowshoe miles as the good bishop, but she does get around the U.P. from her Eagle River home.