Samuel Charles Mazzuchelli

Builder of the Frontier Church

Samuel Mazzuchelli was born in Milan in 1806 to a prosperous banking family and entered the Dominican Order at seventeen over his father’s objections. Volunteering for the American missions, he arrived in 1828 and was ordained in 1830 at age 23, then sent as the lone priest to a vast Great Lakes frontier.

He ministered first to the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Ottawa, and Ojibwe peoples around Mackinac Island and Green Bay, publishing a Winnebago prayer book in 1833 and a Chippewa liturgical almanac in 1834 that was the first item printed in Wisconsin.

From the mid-1830s he shifted to the lead-mining region where Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois meet, serving miners and settlers of every creed. Both Catholics and Protestants loved the priest the Irish nicknamed Father Kelly. He designed and built more than 24 churches, founded parishes across the Upper Mississippi Valley, and in 1847 founded the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters, a teaching congregation that continues today. He died at Benton, Wisconsin, on February 23, 1864, of pneumonia contracted while riding out in bitter cold to visit the sick.

His cause opened in the Diocese of Madison in 1964. Pope John Paul II declared his heroic virtue on July 6, 1993, making him Venerable. A presumed miracle, the disappearance of a Wisconsin man’s lung tumor after prayer at Sinsinawa Mound with Mazzuchelli’s penance chain, was investigated by a Madison tribunal in 2008 and sent to Rome; his beatification awaits an approved miracle.

Timeline