EDITOR’S NOTE: Paul G. Monson of Marquette University was one of three recipients of ACHA Graduate Student Summer Research Grants in the summer of 2013. Click here for more information on ACHA grants.

Paul G. Monson, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

“Lakota Catholicism in Rome: The Reports of Bishop Martin Marty on Sitting Bull and the Dakotan Frontier, 1880-1893.”

This past June the ACHA’s Graduate Student Research Grant made possible significant discoveries for my dissertation work. I used the grant to travel to the Academy of American Franciscan History located in Berkeley, California. With the valuable assistance of Jeffrey Burns, the director, I was able to find and copy the academy’s private notes on U.S. Catholic documents in the Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide in Vatican City. This opportunity has advanced my research goals to publish a new critical history of Martin Marty, O.S.B. (1834–1896) in light of his cultural encounter with the Lakota leader Tatanka Iyotake, better known as Sitting Bull (c.1831–1890).

In the course of my research for my dissertation on Marty, a critical lacuna in documentation came to light. Through a grant from the Cushwa Center in 2011, I was able to examine the University of Notre Dame Archives’ microfilm copy of the Propaganda Fide Archives (the only copy outside of Rome). These documents contain Marty’s official correspondence with various curial officials while he was vicar apostolic of Dakota Territory (1880–1889) and bishop of Sioux Falls, South Dakota (1889–1894). However, my work in Notre Dame’s collection uncovered how its microfilm of the Propaganda Fide Archives does not include the critical years 1880-1893. At the same time, I also discovered that the only calendar of the Propaganda Fide archives (United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives: A Calendar, published by the Academy of American Franciscan History) ends with 1880 (vol. 13) and a new volume covering up to 1882 (vol. 14) is currently in print. However, the Academy does have all the notes for these years, and through Jeffrey Burns’s generous invitation and the ACHA’s financial assistance, I was able to research and copy the unpublished notes on Marty’s documents in Rome. My next step is to locate and analyze the original documents in Rome by using these notes. 

My research yielded both expected and unexpected results. I anticipated more notes on Marty’s interaction with Lakota culture when he was apostolic vicar and bishop. The notes do testify to several detailed accounts of Catholic life on the Northern Plains when Rome considered raising his vicariate to a new diocese. Alone these reports will be invaluable, as they offer a rare description of Dakota and its indigenous population to a European audience. However, it appears that Marty limited his correspondence with Rome because of delays between letters and more pressing pastoral matters that he believed he could resolve at the local level. Nevertheless, one notable exception was the issue of permanent marriage among the Lakota. Because the Lakota neither recognized nor understood the Catholic doctrine on the indissolubility of marriage and retained more nebulous, polygamous structures within their society, Marty seems to have sought the Vatican’s advice on how to reconcile these differences. The details of this pastoral problem remained unknown, since only the documents in Rome contain Marty’s explanations and Rome’s verdict. Aside from this discovery, more surprising records shed light on Marty’s controversial interaction with the Sisters of Mercy, whom he eventually expelled from his vicariate and replaced with Swiss Benedictine sisters (the sponsors of Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota). Anne Butler has recently mentioned this controversy in her new book, Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 (2012). The detailed notes in Berkeley on this matter suggest that Bulter’s scathing critique of Marty as autocratic and misogynist is cursory and unbalanced (especially in light of his amicable relationships with other sisters and St. Katharine Drexel). In fact, at least of quarter of Marty’s correspondence with Rome during the years in question revolved around the Sisters of Mercy and their accusations against him. The Berkeley notes reveal that the superior of the sisters made her opinion known in the Vatican, which in turn showed little partially for Marty and rather immediately sought a third-party investigation. In the end, it appears that Rome sided with Marty. The precise truth of the charges on either side may never be known, but the Roman documents hold the keys to a more thorough analysis of what might be a timely and enlightening study of a particular chapter of episcopal interaction with women religious in America. Overall my research objectives were met and I can now proceed to the final stage of my comprehensive study of Marty. After I defend my dissertation in the coming spring, I hope to publish a revision of my research as book that will appeal to both scholars and the general public.