In the December, 1984, issue of American Heritage magazine, historical novelist Walter D. Edmonds wrote that he wished he had been present on 18 May, 1675, when Father Jacques Marquette, S. J., breathed his last.  Edmonds (1903-1998) had an eye for the dramatic moment:  In 1936 he secured his literary reputation with Drums along the Mohawk, a novel that sold almost as many copies as that year’s runaway best-seller, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.  Like her novel of the American Civil War, Edmonds’, about the American Revolution, became in 1939 a major motion picture, in this case one that was directed by John Ford and that starred Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert.

As Edmonds noted, at the time of his death Marquette had been working as a missionary among the Indians of what is now Michigan, and on Easter Sunday of 1675, he had celebrated Mass with some five thousand of them present.  Not all those assembled were Christian, but all held the priest in high regard, even reverence.  All knew that the austere, balding young man (he was thirty-seven), so selfless and brave, was gravely ill.

When Marquette died, another Frenchman followed Marquette’s final instructions and rang a hand bell.  “I wish I might have been there,” Edmonds wrote, “to hear those small and lonely notes.”  To his way of thinking, the ringing of that bell “marked the end of the most spiritual and also down-to-earth of all the Jesuit missionaries,” and all can agree that those words aptly describe Marquette, although one hopes they applied to others as well.

Yet puzzling is the further importance Edmonds gave to the melancholy ringing of that bell.  According to him, it also marked “the end of a simplicity and faith that were not to be reborn in America.”  Throughout the history of religion in North America, one finds ample simplicity, the Shakers and the Trappists being among the best known examples, and, whether one can quantify any individual person’s faith, in simply objective terms, Marquette’s faith, the Catholic faith that inspired such great Jesuits as Saint Ignatius Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, remains a vital feature of life in Canada and the United States.

Still, Edmonds was right to focus on the death of Marquette as a compelling and significant moment.  While no one seems to have made a dramatic film about Marquette and his daring travels, there is Black Robe (1991), based on an excellent novel of that name from 1985 by an Irish-Canadian writer, Brian Moore.  Set thirty years before Marquette arrived in New France, modern Canada, it brilliantly evoked the starkly beautiful and often hostile world in which Marquette and the other seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries to North America worked.

Whether anyone has achieved Marquette’s level or depth of faith, it is worth considering his spiritual life.  Two of the more readable accounts of Marquette’s life that remain in print are Francis Parkman’s LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West, first published in 1869, and August Derleth’s Father Marquette and the Great Rivers, first published in 1955.  Both works shed light on Marquette’s spirituality, Parkman in a dozen or so pages, Derleth in more than a hundred.

Parkman was a Boston Brahmin and a Protestant, Derleth a Catholic from Wisconsin.  In his stately prose, Parkman gave matter-of-fact accounts of Marquette’s holiness and of a miracle attributed to him, while Derleth supplied the imagination with descriptions of Marquette’s explorations of the Mississippi and some of its northern its tributaries.  Derleth aimed his brief, often fictionalized text, at nine to fifteen year-olds sixty years ago, but it nevertheless appeals also to older readers today.  Parkman provided the reader with another missionary among many, Derleth with an intrepid hero.

For there is a “boy’s history” element to Marquette’s missionary work, the hardships of leaving home for a foreign land combining with the perils of exploring a harsh wilderness populated with wild animals and shrewd natives not guaranteed to be friendly.  To put the tale in some historical context, one should keep in mind that by the time of Marquette’s death, his slightly younger contemporary, William Penn, had yet to sail for North America.  For an American boy reading Derleth’s little book, part of the thrill is in learning that these adventures occurred in the American middle West; facing danger for Christ could happen close to home.

Along with a pioneering Franciscan missionary to California, Junípero Serra, since beatified, Marquette stands immortalized in marble in Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol.  All the same, Marquette undertook his role as explorer because of his calling to be a missionary in an uncharted land.  His physical adventures served his adventures of the spirit.

“He was a devout votary of the Virgin Mary,” wrote Parkman, “who, imagined to his mind in shapes of the most transcendent loveliness, . . . was to him the object of an adoration not unmingled with a sentiment of chivalrous devotion.”  Parkman added that under her care, “his gentle and noble nature knew no fear,” and “for her he burned to dare and to suffer, discover new lands and conquer new realms to her sway.”  In keeping with this allusion to a knight errant and his lady, Marquette’s character was sterling:  No bullying or arrogance, no sexual misconduct or financial chicanery.

In a footnote, Parkman record that, “The contemporary Relation tells us that a miracle took place at the burial of Marquette.”  Parkman noted that one of the Frenchmen present, “overcome with grief and colic,” pressed some of the soil from the grave “to the seat of pain” and was at once healed.

Marquette’s physical courage went hand in hand with his humility.  Moreover, his diplomatic dealings with the various Indian tribes he encountered bear witness to his prudence and charity.  As a priest of the Jesuit society, he drew strength from his prayers, especially the Mass, and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.

Whether enduring the elements with his fellow Frenchmen or smoking a peace pipe with Indian leaders, Marquette radiated inner balance and serenity.  As Edmonds put it, Marquette was a “most spiritual and down-to-earth” man, and he abides as a model for all Catholics, and others as well, of virtue, self-sacrifice, and sanctity.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.