Frederic Baraga

The Snowshoe Priest

Frederic Baraga was born on June 29, 1797, in the village of Mala Vas in what is now Slovenia, and was ordained in Ljubljana in 1823. Volunteering for the American Indian missions, he landed in Cincinnati in January 1831 and by May was at L’Arbre Croche in Michigan among the Odawa, where in 1837 he produced the first book printed in the Ottawa language.

From 1835 he served the Ojibwe at La Pointe on Lake Superior’s Madeline Island, and in 1843 founded the mission at L’Anse, Michigan. His grammar and his 1853 Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language remain foundational reference works, and he composed roughly one hundred Catholic hymns in Ojibwe.

To reach scattered missions across the frozen Upper Great Lakes he traveled hundreds of miles each winter on snowshoes, into his sixties, earning the name the Snowshoe Priest. In 1853 he was consecrated in Cincinnati as Vicar Apostolic of Upper Michigan, and in 1857 became the first bishop of the diocese later seated at Marquette, shepherding Native communities and a growing immigrant mining population alike. Worn out by his labors, he died in Marquette on January 19, 1868, and is buried in St. Peter Cathedral there.

Devotion began at his death. The Bishop Baraga Association formed in 1930, the cause formally opened in 1952, and in 1972 nearly two hundred US bishops petitioned Rome on his behalf. After the positio’s acceptance in 1998, Pope Benedict XVI approved the decree of heroic virtue promulgated on May 10, 2012, declaring him Venerable. An alleged miraculous cure was forwarded to the Vatican’s medical commission in 2019.

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