Francis Xavier Pierz
"[2] Father Pierz was born into an ethnic Slovene peasant family in Godič, near the town of Kamnik in the Hapsburg-ruled Duchy of Carniola within the Austrian Empire (now Slovenia).
In 1835, Pierz departed for the missions of the United States after years of being inspired by the published letters of the Slovenian missionary known as, "The Snowshoe Priest", and future Bishop of Marquette, Father Frederic Baraga,[4] who worked in present-day Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Wisconsin.
Pierz also composed a long work of narrative Slovenian poetry about Marie's life and death, which he titled Pesmi od ajdovske deklice ("The Song of the Indian Girl").
Her father always wore the rosary around his neck, visited pagan lodges, spoke amid many tears of the mercies of God regarding his own conversion and of the life of his blessed daughter, who thrice was granted the happiness of a vision of her transfigured Savior, and brought to me a number of Indians eager to learn the Christian religion.
The Ojibwa Indians living there had turned to commercial fishing on Lake Superior and selling their catches for a considerable profit to the American Fur Company.
Pierre Picotte, a Métis who worked as an agent for the company, had been instructing local Ojibwe in the Catechism and preparing them to join the Catholic Church.
"[12] In obedience to Pope Gregory XI's 1373 "règle d'idiom", a commandment for the Catholic clergy to communicate with their flocks in the local vernacular, instead of allowing the Church to become a tool of colonialism, linguistic imperialism, and coercive language death,[13] Fr.
He was recruited for the newly organized Diocese of Saint Paul, where Bishop Joseph Crétin urgently needed priests to serve his vast territory.
The Mass took place inside a[17] log cabin, located midway between Sauk Rapids and the ghost town of Watab and 3/4 miles inland from the Mississippi River,[18] and owned by James Keough, a former merchant seaman from County Wexford, Ireland.
During an interview at White Earth during the 1920s, Mrs. Isabel (née Vanoss) Belcourt, formerly of Otter Tail Lake, recalled, "They fixed him a good bed, but he always slept on the floor wrapped in a blanket.
"[21] After the United States Federal Government signed the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux with the Dakota people in 1851, it declared much of southern and central Minnesota open to White settlement.
The first Catholics to settle in what is now Stearns County were former Sauk Rapids pioneers James and Katherine Keough, who built a farmhouse and homestead on the modern site of the St.
Cloud VA. James Keough later recalled, "About the time that the Treaty with the Sioux Indians was ratified, I asked Father Pierz to come across the Mississippi River and see what a fine country was there.
"[23] Noticing many Protestant Yankee settlers from the Northern Tier, Father Pierz tried at first to interest his fellow Slovenes to settle in the region, but with limited success.
Writing in newspapers such as Der Wahrheitsfreund (The Friend of Truth), based in Cincinnati, Ohio, he wrote glowing descriptions of Minnesota's climate, its soil, and its large tracts of free land for homesteaders.
He continued, "I do wish that the choicest pieces of land in this delightful Territory would become the property of thrifty Catholics who would make an earthly paradise of this Minnesota which Heaven has so richly blessed, and who would bear out the opinion that Germans prove to be the best farmers and the best Christians in America."
"[27] According to historian Kathleen Neils Conzen, "Within weeks of the publication of his letter, scouts from separate German Catholic settlements in northeastern and north-central Illinois, southwestern and northwestern Indiana, northeastern, north-central, and southern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, eastern Wisconsin, and central Missouri had converged on the Sauk River Valley, and fifty pioneering families huddled in crude cabins that bitterly cold winter.
The following year, he was instrumental in bringing Mother Benedicta Riepp and a group of Benedictine nuns from the Abbey founded by Saint Walpurga in Eichstätt, Kingdom of Bavaria, to educate the many children of the German immigrants in Central Minnesota.
Pierz subsequently eulogized his deceased fellow missionary in a work of Slovenian poetry, which he titled Spomenik Lovrencu Lavtižaru, bivšemu misijonarju v severni Ameriki.
During an interview on White Earth in the 1920s, John Fairbanks recalled, "The Indian soldiers at Crow Wing, before leaving for the Civil War, marched to Father Pierz in solemn file.
[35] Largely in reaction to this rumor and warlike coaxing by Hole in the Day, a group from the Leech Lake Ojibwe burned down the Indian Agency in Walker, Minnesota, took prisoners, and marched to Crow Wing.
Pierz's decades of missionary work had taught him about the great importance of family connections within Odawa and Ojibwe culture, as well as the very deep love that parents feel for their children.
He explained that there was already widespread outrage over the many settlers slain by the Dakota throughout the Minnesota River valley, that the United States military was too numerous and too powerful for them to defeat, and what is now called genocide could very easily be unleashed against the whole Ojibwe people, including their wives and their children.
Pierz described a recent New Ulm festival and parade which were, from a Catholic perspective, a very deliberate and insulting mockery of Corpus Christi Eucharistic processions and the doctrine of the Real Presence by the anti-Christian and anti-theistic German-American Turners and Forty-Eighters who had founded and still dominated that settlement.
Fr Pierz expressed a belief that the Dakota attack may have represented divine retribution for both the anti-Catholic festival parade and for what he considered the dishonorable behavior of local settlers' and corrupt Federal Indian Agents.
In an interview during the 1920s, an elderly Catholic Ojibwe recalled that mobbed up Crow Wing political boss Clement Hudon Beaulieu and the other mixed race merchants with whom he had secretly hired the Pillager Band assassins, pretended at the time to be very scandalized by Fr.
[48] In 1871, following a battle with pneumonia from which he never entirely recovered,[49] Father Pierz reluctantly accepted the limitations of age and retired to the predominantly German-speaking[50] parish of Rich Prairie, Morrison County.
The writer of these lines remembers the aged missionary, bowed down with the weight of years, with a faraway look in his eyes, walking the streets of Laibach, but his spirit apparently wandering in the American forests.
[57][58][59][60] As part of the Axis occupation of Slovenia during the Second World War, the tombstones from St. Christopher's Cemetery were all removed by the German Wehrmacht and Royal Italian Army and used to make pillboxes.
Our dear Lord permits us to be humiliated and prepared by much suffering before he employs us as instruments of His mercy in the conversion of the Pagans and allows us to enjoy the comforts of soul their spiritual rebirth causes.
