Catholic Hotdish

“Lucien Galtier — Pioneer Priest,”

by Marianne Luban

Minnesota history buffs, and especially Minnesota Catholic history enthusiasts, will appreciate the research that author Marianne Luban has gathered for this first biography of the priest who built the very first log church in St. Paul.

A street, a school, a plaza, an apartment tower and a handful of other entities in the Minnesota capital bear the name Galtier and pay homage to the interesting French missionary who saw a promising future for a bend in the Mississippi River and had the wisdom to force the former Pig’s Eye Landing to be renamed after the great Apostle to the Gentiles.

Father Lucien Galtier’s letters are the major source for this story, along with the letters of the pioneer bishops and priests who established the church in the Upper Midwest and historical records of the dioceses in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. Luban does an excellent job of getting across this tale of hardship and suffering, and her research gives new insight into the iconic figure whose name lives on long after his death in 1866 at the age of 54.

The French missionaries arrived in the New World zealous to convert the “barbarian” native people to Christianity, and they suffered greatly in their efforts. Luban helps us see Galtier as a somewhat different missionary:

“Galtier clearly did not view himself as an expendable sacrifice to the cause. He was a man who knew his own worth and became troubled when he thought his talents were being wasted. He did not shrink from his duty, as he saw it, but preferred to do it with a modicum of dignity. Comfort, of course, was out of the question, but the sheer deprivation Galtier face year after year seemed to him in aid of nothing but the breaking of the spirit.”

A complex man

The bulk of Galtier’s letters, then, are complaints to his bishop — nagging, whining and demanding. But Luban helps us see another side of the missionary through other sources.  The priest is said to have had a remarkable personality and power — “the face of a Caesar and the heart of a Madonna” — a strong, rich singing voice. And he was a workaholic.

We learn that although Father Lucien was sent to Minnesota to convert the Indians, he struggled with the Sioux language, and found that he preferred ministering to those who were already committed Catholics. Sent to build a church in Keokuk, Iowa, he took over an old house, “covered part of the back room, made a door, placed a small window, laid out a wood floor and plastered a little,” he wrote to Bishop Mathias Loras in Dubuque, but as was his want, he added:

“I don’t want to be all the time a plasterer, a carpenter, a cook, and others, but only a priest, a holy priest, and a priest a little more involved than in Keokuk.”

As interesting as the reading is and as informative as it is about the pioneer church in the mid-19th century, the material has the potential to be a much more.

What if…

First, the work needed a stronger editor and proofreader. There is a bad typo that moves an action inexplicably from 1843 to 1943. Also, no professional editor would have allowed an author to acknowledge that she asked an astrologer to come up with a personality profile of her subject.

No editor worth his or her salt would have allowed the text to go off on so many tangents.

Time after time Galtier’s biography wanders, sidetracked by anecdotes about other priests of the era. A good example is the tale about the  priest who shot one of the early bishops of Winona, MN. It’s as if in her research the author came across some juicy tidbit and couldn’t resist putting it in the book that was ostensibly a biography of just one priest.

Second, this really is good material — great research — but I couldn’t help but wonder how much impact it might have if done in another literary genre. Rather than the biography of one priest, the captivating stories of the lives of several priests who served the Upper Midwest in pioneer times would make an interesting and very readable historical novel.

Because Galtier wrote no autobiography, Luban has been led to make assumptions about him. That’s fodder more for a work of fiction, not biography. Second use of the material? — bz

“Jesus,”

by Paul Johnson

Ever felt uncomfortable discussing religion in a mixed-faith setting because you don’t feel you’ve really “kept up” with matters of faith?

Paul Johnson’s brief (226 pages) easy-reading story of Jesus — subtitled “A Biography from a Believer” — will get you up to speed with some facts Catholics should know. It will also remind you what Christianity values and why you value your faith life. Johnson is an unabashed cheerleader for the faith, and he writes early on that he wants to share “the joy and nourishment” of following Jesus’ footsteps and pondering his words.

Although I’ve read a lot of religious material, reading “Jesus” gave me a much better mental picture of the era in which he walked this earth, helping me place his life in the time of not just Julius Caesar but Ovid, Livy and Seneca, the Romans whose writing has put life in the Roman Empire into our hands.

But I’d hesitate before giving Johnson my complete trust as a biographer or historian, and I think he’d find that perfectly acceptable.

Meet a new Jesus

In my notes I kept jotting down “first I’ve heard of that,” which did make me suspicious that some of Johnson’s “biography” might be suspect. For example, he writes that Mary was a source for Luke’s gospel, that Jesus’ baptism was witnessed by a large crowd, that one task of the apostles was to “protect” Jesus, and that Jesus’ “few days of rest were spent fishing.”

What these might very well be called would be “guesses.” Johnson says they are “mere deductive supposition.” When he describes Jesus’ appearance and the way he held himself, I’d call that analysis without basis of fact. Yes, Jesus did teach at meal time, but did he “love” to?

But whether or not Jesus could recite Homer and Virgil is less important than the aura of Jesus that I think readers will get about the subject of this “biography.” You’ll meet a new Jesus here, one you’ve likely never thought about in the same way.

Johnson offers us a pleasant, colloquial way of absorbing Jesus’ teachings in somewhat of a condensed version of the gospels, and he follows up by explaining why Jesus taught those lessons.

Don’t miss the homilies

The most useful section of the book may be Johnson’s explanation of why Jesus came and what Johnson charges might be a “New Ten Commandments” Jesus taught. You can see the list below, but it’s Johnson’s writes a page or more about each, and every one could serve as a homily worth hearing.

Johnson calls Jesus’ teachings a moral and social framework that have been invaluable to our world, and, if this book were this section alone it would be enough to inspire every Christian to re-commit themselves to following Jesus’ more closely. Here’s the best part:

“Human progress has proved an illusion as often as not. In many ways our society is no better organized and led than in those weary days two m ago when men like Herod and Pilate ruled. Insofar as we have improved — in the way we look after the poor, the sick, the infirm, the powerless; in our treatment of children; in moral education and training; in penology and the redressing of grievances; in the effort to spread material welfare and to encourage people to show kindness to one another and help their neighbors in difficult times — these improvements have come about because we have had the sense, the sensibility, the intelligence, and the pertinacity to follow where Jesus led. If goodness has a place in our twenty-first century world, it is because Jesus, by his worlds and actions, showed us how to put it there. No other man in history has had this effect over so long a time, over the whole of the earth’s surface, and over such a range of issues.”

If that’s not enough evidence to believe in God, I don’t know what would be. — bz

“Jesus’ New Ten Commandments”

1. Each of us must develop a true personality. We have a duty to be aware of our existence as an act of God’s creation

2. Accept and abide by, universality. Each soul is unique, but each is part of humanity.

3. Respect the fact that we are all equal in God’s eyes.

4. Love is a must in human relationships, at all times and in every situation.

5. We are to show mercy just as God shows mercy to us.

6. Keep balanced; don’t be an extremist.

7. Cultivate an open mind.

8. The pursuit of truth, unabridged, simple and pure, unstained by passion, is the most valuable of human activities.

9. Use power carefully, and pay due respect to the powerless.

10. Show courage.

“Life in Year One,”

by Scott Korb

Perhaps my expectations were too high.

I thought “Life in Year One” would make me feel as though I were walking through Israel 2,009 years ago, taking in the sights Jesus would see, smelling the scents Jesus would smell, feeling the atmosphere of the places where Jesus walked.

Author Scott Korb does his best to piece together snatches of what is known about the period of time when Jesus lived and a few decades after his death, but I’m afraid the odds were against him being able to give readers that palpable sense of place that I was looking forward to.

After all, unlike later periods of human history, there are no diaries to rely on other than the gospels, and the major history was written by Josephus, a Jew who found it worth his while to cozy up to the conquering Romans, and Korb several times points out the exaggerations that make Josephus’ history suspect.

Readers will learn about money, food, bathing and buildings during Jesus’ time on Earth. It’s information that’s interesting enough, although a bit of repetition has bulked up what is a relatively short book here, only 208 pages.

Faith at the heart

The most interesting information involves religion, especially the fact that while there were numerous divisions within the unity of the Hebrew faith, a lot of the debating happened at the so-called upper levels was unimportant to people who lived away from the heated discussions among members of competing sects. Korb notes, “When it comes to religion as it was really and truly lived and things were really and truly believed, the people who seem to have been in charge were probably a little out of touch.”

The most important analysis Korb makes, in my view, is explaining the deep connection between the people of Israel and their religion:

“You cannot separate the lives of the people of this land from their belief in the God who put them there. More to the point, you cannot separate the lives of the people of this land from their belief that God had put them there.”

To the Jewish believers God was “the central piece of history itself,” Korb writes, and the typical Jew of the time felt and understood that God was involved in everything — that “what came from the ground, what lived in the trees, every hair on your, belonged to God” — as it had for your ancestors. It was a belief passed down genetically.

Because of the centrality of religion in the lives of the Jewish people of Jesus’ time, the synagogue was the center of a community’s life — and not just for worship. The synagogues that Jesus would have attended would have served as well as a soup kitchen, a town hall, a hostel and a school. As Korb notes:

“The people came and fed one another, taught one another. The place bustled all week. A visitor always knew he’d have a place to stay. And the Sabbath was hardly more important than the rest of the week. This tradition had been passed down through their genes. And despite all their disagreements and debates, even despite the power of Rome and the culture of Greece, they always had that. Tradition. And the synagogue was the place to practice it.”

If only we knew more

“Life in Year One” does a solid job of helping readers appreciate what it was like for the Jews to have been absorbed into the Roman Empire and actively work at keeping their Jewish identity while under Roman rule. Korb does a great service in bringing that feeling to the surface.

After reading “The Pacific” recently — a wonderful account of World War II in that part of the world, thanks to diaries written by marines and documents kept by the government — I couldn’t help but wish that Mary, for example, had written a diary and that some day it will be discovered in an archaeological dig.  There’s a book I’d love to read. — bz

“Food Will Win the War: Minnesota Crops, Cooks and Conservation during World War I,”

by Rae Katherine Eighmey

Baby boomers, get ready to be amazed at what our ancestors did that I’ll bet you never heard about.

Food historian Rae Katherine Eighmey has pulled together bushels of facts that I’ll be surprised if the post-World War II crowd has read or been told about. Page after page of this Minnesota Historical Society Press paperback brought behavior changes and sacrifices that were news to me.

I’d heard generic references to rationing from relatives, but much of that was from their WWII experience. The first World War was a whole different, untold story. Believing “food will win the war,” U.S. leaders asked that food be conserved at every American table.

Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays were all part of a national program to conserve protein for the fighting men and to enable more food to be shipped to the starving people of Europe.

Eighmey called food conservation during World War I “the first large-scale, social-networking enterprise of the twentieth century,” and it was accomplished before radio, television and telephones in much of the country.

“This was ‘everyone’s war,’” Eighmey noted, “and accomplishing this task depended upon the good will of informed and enlightened American citizens. It succeeded, thanks to the organized and voluntary efforts of ordinary people meeting in kitchens and classrooms, libraries, theaters, and churches, on street corners and over backyard fences all across the country — sharing information, inspiring cooperation, and creating solutions.”

Peer-influenced results

The recipe for success included two main ingredients, Eighmey wrote: Persuasive information and the actions put into motion by social-networking and peer-influence efforts.  Harvesting letters home, newspapers from the era, little circulated newsletters and national archives, the author shows how during those war years of 1917-18 Minnesotans in cities, towns and rural areas demonstrated how to be unselfish, how to be responsible citizens, and how to willing people can be on behalf of the common good.

Men, women and children in every household reduced their intake of wheat, meat, fats and sugar. In February 1918, only three of the week’s 21 meals were without restriction: seven were meatless, seven were wheatless and five were both meatless and wheatless.

Slogans became part of the social influences. Every woman, for example, was allegedly “drafted” into the ranks of the “Army of American Housewives”  — kitchen warriors saving calories that would feed the troops instead. Farmers were referred to as “soldiers of the soil.”

Growing food in victory gardens and canning extra food became important for even city dwellers, and the University of Minnesota’s home economists  got to work inventing new recipes to use substitute ingredients for wheat flour and beef, putting corn meal, rice and barley flour into recipes for bread,   and encouraging consumption of more pork, chicken and fish. Among the recipes devised by one Minnesotan: a wheatless, sugar-saving potato chocolate cake.

Minnesotans were urged to eat more cottage cheese, grow more potatoes, and to “Can Vegetables, Fruit and the Kaiser, too.”

Needed instruction done

Milk as a protein substitute went over well in a dairy state like Minnesota, and the university’s extension serve, the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Food Administration all took educational efforts wherever they could find a group willing to listen to instructions about cold-pack canning, making cottage cheese, even storing eggs for up to six months.

Thanks to Eighmey and the Minnesota Historical Society, those of us who’ve never been forced to ration anything have a better idea of how some remarkable numbers were achieved. America shipped 23 million metric tons of food to Europe during the years of the first World War.

As a poster at the time noted, Americans could “Save a loaf a week, help win the war.”

And they did. — bz

Order by clicking on http://shop.mnhs.org/moreinfomhspress.cfm?Product_ID=2548

“The Worst Hard Time,”
by Timothy Egan

You may have seen photos of the Dust Bowl, but read Timothy Egan’s comprehensive history and you can taste the dirt and feel the wind blast against your skin.

Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl,” paints such a vivid portrait of those 1930s years of dry, violent storms that you’ll find yourself coughing and swallowing hard just imagining what it must have been like when nature punished farmers for turning millions of acres of grassland into billowing towers of dust, dirt and sand.

Imagine how hard times must have been that people in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and southwestern Colorado would be driven to eat pickled tumbleweed to survive.

Imagine going three years without a paycheck.

Imagine your small town newspaper editor describing as “sissies” those who — after losing all the top soil from their land, not having anything to feed their cattle, watching their children, spouses and relatives die from “dust pneumonia” — didn’t have the “courage” to stick out the hard times.

Through interviews with people who lived through the 1930s in the Dust Bowl counties and terrific research, including amazing diary entries from a farmer who lost everything, Egan helps his readers know this little-known era of American history.

It’s a dense work, filled with information, especially information about real people – how they felt, how they cried, how they survived.

It’s an honest history, too, one not afraid to acknowledge both the failed recovery programs of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and the conservation-minded ones that began to work to revive the land in places.

Whether or not you believe that the planet faces climate change today, this is a book that should help everyone understand how connected humanity is to the soil. The consequences of not valuing the soil result in tragedies like the Dust Bowl — something no one who reads this book would ever want to go through. — bz

“Shakespeare: The World as Stage,”
by Bill Bryson

William Shakespeare’s birth was recorded in Latin, but he dies in English.

It’s a factoid that summarizes well the impact that playwright and poet Will Shakespeare had on his native tongue — and it’s been a lasting impact. More than 400 years later; English speakers around the globe use — without knowing their source — words and phrases created by the Bard of Avon.

If you’ve ever said, one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, be in a pickle, cold comfort, foul play, tower of strength, you’ve been quoting Shakespeare.

Bill Bryson points to a dozen or so words first found in Shakespeare, too, but he digs up little known facts about Shakespeare the man, not just the literary figure, to keep the interest of any reader, not just wordsmiths.

Bryson posits, for example, that Shakespeare exploited the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1586), leveraging renewed British patriotism to stage his history plays to the audiences of the day.

Those audiences were working people primarily, evidence that Will knew how to write for the masses. Although late 16th century laborers were poor, they found Shakespeare’s plays worth spending a pence or two to get into the Globe Theater for a “groundling” spot.

A couple times throughout the book there references to Shakespeare’s religion. Was he Catholic? Not enough evidence to say one way or the other, Bryson concludes, but what his research offers is insight into the anti-Catholic prejudice of the day.

Catholics were seen as such a threat to the government after the failed “Powder Treason” of 1604, where 36 barrels of gunpowder were found in a cellar beneath Westminster Palace and one Guy Fawkes waiting for the signeal to light the fuse. Bryson reports, “The reaction against Catholics was swift and decisive. They were barred from key professions and, for a time, not permitted to travel more than five miles from home. A law was even proposed to make them wear striking and preposterous hats, for ease of identification, but it was never enacted.”

There’s much, much more about who Shakespeare knew, who influenced his work, the royalty who supported him and his players, and plenty of investigation into the literary question that continues through the centuries: Did Shakespeare really write everything attributed to Shakespeare?

You aren’t likely to be interested in the details that Bryson goes into, but he’s such a good writer even those parts go quickly in this brief, 199-page book. Bryson makes even Will’s will interesting reading. — bz

“I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: The Lost Tale of The Underground Railroad”
by Karolyn Smardz Frost

What would it have been like to be a slave?

And what kind of courage did a slave have to have to risk escaping to freedom?

Archeologist and historian Karolyn Smardz Frost dug up some facts and artifacts about a Black couple named Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, and she puts together the scraps of her finds and tedious research to answer those questions and more in “I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land.”
This is a great read, one with dramatic turns that keep you turning pages.

And it’s an educational read as well.

If your American History classes brushed by the era of the Underground Railroad in a hurry to concentrated on the U.S. Civil War, “Glory Land” will fill in the missing gap.
It’s a part of history every North American should know.

And I say North America because, for the people Frost traces back to their one-time slave state of Kentucky, “Glory Land” is Canada.

More we were never taught
That was news to me. I thought the end of the Underground Railroad was just somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In fact, a line of the series of safe houses and sanctuaries for fugitive slaves ran up into Detroit and across the Detroit River to what was then Upper Canada, now Ontario.

How laws in the United States worked against slaves who tried to escape their bondage was news to me, too.

Of course in school we learned about the Dred Scott Decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that protected the rights of slave owners. But legalisms that cooperated with the slave faction abounded. When the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 opened up the Midwest for settlement, its article six provided that runaway slaves be returned to their owners.

As early as 1793 there was even a federal law, the Fugitive Slave Law, that required slaves to be returned to their masters.

Canada deserves some props
The Canadians don’t come off pure as the driven snow with regard to racial bias, but their protection of the right of freedom for any British subject saved the day for the Thornton and Lucie Blackburn and thousands of other former slaves who fled the cruelty and inhumanity of the slave system.

Theirs is a story all should know.

And the refresher course on what slave owners did – how they treated other human beings – is a lesson Americans should never forget. – bz