Myths of the Rune Stone
Page 12
As Robert Orsi observes, there was a “rise of U.S. Catholic historical consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century.”23 Ireland’s endorsement of the Minnesota rune stone can be seen as an effort to bolster the social status of his fellow Catholics by integrating them into the American collective memory. The runic inscription demonstrates the presence of Catholic missionaries five hundred years before Minnesota became a state. When Ireland spoke of Scandinavian Americans, he remarked that they were “always largely represented in the legislature and in various state and municipal offices.”24 By declaring the Kensington Rune Stone to be Catholic in origin, he was able to tap into its power as a symbol of ethnic pride for Protestant Scandinavian Americans. If Swedes and Norwegians could prove their loyalty by claiming a foundational role in the origins of the United States, so too could Catholics.25 Ireland had already demonstrated his commitment to Catholic American history when he founded the Catholic Historical Society of St. Paul in 1905. At the time, he recruited Father Francis J. Schaefer to be the editor of its new Catholic history publication Acta et Dicta. Following Ireland’s visit to the Minnesota Historical Society, he assigned Father Schaefer to be one of the five members the Society’s museum committee that studied the rune stone in detail. The following year, Schaefer published an article in Acta et Dicta declaring to his Catholic audience that the Minnesota stone was a “Catholic artifact.”26
It is tempting to assume that Catholic claims to the country’s origin story had already been firmly established by Christopher Columbus. When the Catholic fraternal order known as the Knights of Columbus was founded in 1882, the Italian explorer, said to be the first European to discover America, was upheld as the “first Catholic in America” and “ancestor of all American Catholics.”27 However, this point was lost among Protestant Americans and even many Catholics until well into the twentieth century. Prior to that, Columbus was widely viewed as a generic, nonethnic symbol of American national identity.28 Celebrations of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1892 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 were largely devoid of any acknowledgment of Columbus’s Italian ethnicity or Catholic religiosity. The Exposition was primarily a tribute “to American national grandeur and [was] fully in the hands of the wealthy elite, inspired . . . by a national rather than ‘foreign’ sentiment.”29
Catholic leaders of the early twentieth century were well aware of this historical bias. In a 1916 article in the Catholic Historical Review, the editors delivered a strong critique of two then-current textbooks in U.S. history that largely ignored the role of Catholics in American life, stating that one book “deliberately throws the mantle of England around the whole of the Colonization Period” and leads the reader to assume that Catholic explorers such as Columbus, Magellan, and de Soto were simply “workers in the establishment of the English Colonies.”30 The article called on Catholic authors to work toward a new history of the Catholic church in the United States and suggested that the Kensington Rune Stone could play an important role in the narrative. The article noted the Minnesota Historical Society’s recently published favorable opinion on the authenticity of the controversial stone and expressed optimism that it would eventually be endorsed by other experts and officially recognized as the earliest written source for the Catholic history of the United States.31 Although Catholic historians continued to push for broader recognition of Columbus’s Catholicity, the endorsement of the Kensington Rune Stone provided another means to establish a foundational presence in U.S. history.
The need to do so only intensified in the coming decades. Writing in the 1930s, one Catholic historian lamented that “an unbroken record of a century and a half of Catholic patriotism” had not cast out the “ghost of political bigotry.”32 Following the First World War, a nativist movement spurred a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted, among others, immigrant Catholics. Although Midwestern Klan activity was most prevalent in states such as Indiana, an estimated thirty thousand Klan members were in the state of Minnesota by the mid-1920s. An inscription on a piece of the Minnesota Klan’s memorabilia illustrates its specifically anti-Catholic doctrine: “I would rather be a Klansman in a robe of snowy white than a Catholic priest in robe black as night. For a Klansmen is an American, and America is his home. But the priest owes his allegiance to a dago pope in Rome.”33 Fears of papal allegiance sparked anti-Catholic rallies throughout the state, including one near the Alexandria area. On the rumor that Pope Pius XI had called Catholics in western Minnesota to stockpile arms for an insurrection, Klan members mobilized 1,500 citizens for a rally during the summer of 1924 near the town of Pelican Rapids. According to local accounts, no Catholics were lynched but an estimated 200 area residents were initiated into Klan membership.34
A culture of anti-Catholicism permeated American rhetoric well into the twentieth century. For much of the century, the dominant literature about the role of religion in U.S. history largely ignored the presence and contributions of Catholics. Scholars of religion relied on a narrative of “American religious history” that originated with New England Puritans in the seventeenth century and culminated with liberal Protestantism in the twentieth.35 During the 1950s, a popular liberal Protestant magazine, The Christian Century, provoked fears of a Catholic-led antidemocratic revolution in the United States by publishing a series of articles titled “Can Catholicism Win America?”36 Also during that time period, the self-proclaimed “anti-Catholic bigot” Paul Blanshard received accolades from prominent American figures such as Albert Einstein and John Dewey for his book warning of the threat of Catholic power.37
Viking Blood and the Cult of Catholic American Martyrs
Sacrifice is one of the most pervasive themes in Catholic American historiography during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Catholic historians have frequently written (often in graphic detail) accounts of American Catholics who heroically gave their lives. As historian Robert Orsi observes, “‘America’ in the Catholic imagination was initially constituted as a network of places connected by the blood of the saints.”38 One of the more popular martyrdom accounts is that of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemont, who were dismembered and killed by Indians near a mission in Quebec. In addition to sacrifices made in their encounters with North America’s first residents, Catholic historians reminded other Americans of the great sacrifices Catholic citizens had made for the nation during important American events such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and even the world wars. However, as Orsi observes, Catholic martyrdom stories often served a dual purpose. On the one hand, Catholic historians endeavored to shape the American civic narratives by showing how Catholics fit into the national story. These narratives, says Orsi, are fundamentally assimilative and American in their aspirations. On the other hand, martyrdom accounts were also instrumental in shaping what Orsi calls the “American Catholic sacred memory,” which is “deeply imbued with Catholic religious sensibility, grounded in the tropes and images of devotional culture, of liturgy, and of Catholic theology, which put it most at odds with the dominant story of the modern American nation.” The goal of these memories is “to transform the United States into a Catholic reality.”39
The two goals of civic and sacred memory production are evident in the writings of Minnesota Catholic leaders who used the Kensington Stone to craft a narrative of sacrifice. In 1952, Catholic historian Father James Michael Reardon published The Catholic Church in The Diocese of St. Paul: From Earliest Origin to Centennial Achievement. In his opening chapter, “The First White Men in Minnesota,” Reardon began his historical narrative about the “earliest origin” of the Catholic presence in Minnesota:
Nearly six centuries ago a group of Swedes and Norwegians made a journey west from Vinland and camped beside a lake on what is now Minnesota soil. The written record of that amazing voyage, unique in the annals of travel, tells the story of the heroic and tragic wanderings of this group of Catholic explorers from the distant fjords of Scandina
via who, in their hour of peril, invoked the aid of the Mother of God in the first prayer of which we have any extant account in the Western world.40
“This Catholic prayer,” said Reardon, served as “the prototype of many others uttered by voyageur and missionary in subsequent years as they ventured into the unexplored region of the upper Mississippi.”41 Reardon asserted that it was Catholic missionaries who were the first to bring “Christ” to the “savage wilderness” in what was one day to become Minnesota. His narrative demonstrated to other white Minnesotans that Catholics too had suffered at the hands of the “savages.” It is a Catholic insertion into the larger American narrative of white pioneer sacrifice.42
However, Reardon also made a claim that runs counter to the prevailing American civic religious sensibilities of the 1950s. He used the rune stone narrative to claim Minnesota, a state where Protestants were in the majority, as a uniquely Catholic space: “In their hour of danger these Catholic adventurers sought help from heaven by appealing to the Blessed Virgin Mary to save them from evil in an invocation characteristic of Norsemen prior to the Reformation . . . In these far-off days Sweden and Norway were as Catholic as all other Christian nations and cultivated filial devotion to the Mother of God.43 This claim, he reminded his readers, came at a cost. The runic inscription told a “tragic story” of a “lost colony of Vikings whose visit conferred baptism on the state by a shedding of Catholic blood.”44 However, in contrast to Protestant Americans who viewed pioneer sacrifices as instrumental in establishing a new “Promised Land” on the American frontier, Catholics likely viewed these sacrifices as an end in themselves. In Orsi’s view, American Catholic sacred memory was preoccupied with the themes of persecution and pain. Therefore, Catholics saw the purpose of missionary journeys to the New World as being “to suffer and die in cruel northern forests and scorched southern deserts at the hands of ‘savages’ whom they loved even as they were tortured and mutilated by them.”45 More than thirteen thousand copies of Reardon’s texts were printed and distributed to parishes throughout the St. Paul Archdiocese and served to localize the narrative of Catholic American sacrifice.46
In 1957, St. Cloud Diocese Bishop Peter W. Bartholome traveled to Alexandria, Minnesota, to dedicate a new Catholic elementary school. In his address, Bartholome evoked the memory of the Catholic Norsemen who “appealed to Our Lady when they were in difficulty and in trial.”47 The bishop went on to affirm the vital role of the Catholic church in educating young people, maintaining that public schools in the United States were deficient because they no longer trained youth in “the thinking of Christ.” As a result, the country was tragically losing its identity as a “Christian nation” and was at risk of becoming “a pagan nation.” Bartholome expressed concern that young people were turning away from the faith in alarming numbers. He said that it was only the Catholic church and a few others that “realize fully the consequences [of this] to democracy and freedom.” He called on Christians to make “unusual sacrifices in establishing Christian Catholic schools where true Americanism, true democracy, and true freedom are taught and trained in the youth of the land.” In other words, Catholic education would be successful by producing students who were willing to sacrifice for the welfare of the nation. The bishop went on to assert that attending a parochial Catholic school did not mark a student as less patriotic. To the contrary, participation in a Catholic school “will make you more of an American.” Bartholome asserted that such schools must utilize diverse methods of teaching children because “as soon as America becomes standardized, as soon as education is under the control of a few men as it is in Russia and countries behind the Iron Curtain, as soon as any activities that Americans pursue become standardized, we cease to be Americans and religion will suffer and the rights of man will be trampled upon.”48
Bartholome’s words are typical of American Catholic leadership during the height of the Cold War. At the time, the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union was framed as a religious battle. In the words of one historian, “American leaders understood the menace of Soviet troops, but they recognized as well that the Cold War would be won or lost not only at the barrel of a gun but also within the conflicted souls at home and around the world.”49 Catholics like Bartholome imagined themselves to be sacrificial defenders of the nation’s religious heritage and they viewed Catholic schools as the means to cultivate a Christian citizenry. Since the 1930s, Catholics had been some of the most vehement American critics of Communism, but after the Second World War, they intensified their critiques as Americans came to broadly recognize it as “the foremost threat to American peace and prosperity.”50 During the 1950s, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen was Catholic America’s most articulate spokesperson on the threat that secularization and Communism posed to American society. Sheen’s anti-Communist rhetoric was a central feature on his weekly prime-time television show viewed by millions of Americans, including many Protestants and Jews.51 Spokespersons like Sheen and Bartholome were instrumental in integrating Catholics into the prevailing American civic religious discourse of the day.52
Devotion to Our Lady of the Runestone
Although Bartholome’s speech served assimilationist goals, it must also be noted that he situated his rhetoric in distinctively Catholic sensibilities. The purpose of Bartholome’s visit to Alexandria’s first Catholic school was to dedicate a shrine to commemorate “Our Lady of the Runestone.”53 The shrine, positioned above the main stairway, consisted of a statue of the Blessed Mother standing next to a replica of the Kensington Rune Stone. A quotation was painted on the wall below it: “Ave Virgo Maria Save us from evil A.D. 1362–1957.”54 In his dedication speech, Bartholome admonished his listeners to pray to Our Lady of the Runestone in times of difficulty and trial.55
Local priest and diocesan historian Vincent A. Yzermans first coined the phrase “Our Lady of the Runestone” in a diocesan newspaper in 1954. That same year, a Franciscan nun, Sister Mary Christine, was inspired to sketch a drawing she called “The Saga of the Runestone.” In her sketch, the Blessed Mother stands above the forested landscape of North America. A Viking ship, an Indian dwelling, and the celestial Northern Lights are also visible. The rune stone is planted in the ground like a gravestone. The text on the sketch says “Our Lady of the Runestone: Ave Virgo Maria Save Us From Evil.” Near the bottom of North America, in what looks to be near Mexico City, is a small star. The star was intended to represent “Our Lady’s appearance at Guadalupe.”56 Sister Mary Christine’s drawing received widespread attention when it accompanied an article about the Kensington Rune Stone in a St. Cloud Diocese paper a few years later.
Known for his promotion of Marian devotion, Bishop Bartholome saw an opportunity in Sister Mary Christine’s artwork. In 1950, Pope Pius XII promulgated the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary; he later declared 1954 to be “a special Marian Year to be observed throughout the church universal.”57 In response, Bishop Bartholome named two parishes after the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and hosted a special Mary’s Day event in a local baseball stadium, which was attended by thirty thousand people. He also brought the Family Rosary Crusade to St. Cloud and Alexandria, where thousands of Catholics signed commitment cards to recite the rosary.58 For Bartholome, promoting devotion to Our Lady of the Runestone would be part of a strategy to foster a localized devotion to Mary. Although Mary had not made an appearance in Minnesota, her presence could be felt in the hearts of lay Catholics through the prayer of the Norsemen.
The shrine dedicated to Our Lady of the Runestone at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Alexandria, 1957. Courtesy of the Kensington Area Heritage Society.
Although the promotion of Our Lady of the Runestone can be a seen as a Catholic homemaking strategy, it is clear that attempts to Americanize the faith also challenged dominant American religious sensibilities. The use of the Scandinavian stone to promote Marian devotion was not welcomed by Lutherans and led some to disparage the religious practices of the fourteenth-centur
y Norse explorers. J. Edor Larson, historian of the Red River Valley Conference of the Augustana Lutheran Church, criticized the Norse Catholics for chanting “Ave Maria” in their moment of distress. The historian contrasts them with the pioneers who settled western Minnesota in the nineteenth century who were “the spiritual product of the Reformation” and brought with them Bibles, copies of Luther’s Catechism, “sound” books of sermons, and devotional literature. In sum, said Larson, these more recent pioneers “were much more concerned about their spiritual life.”59 The implication is that Catholic religious practices, including devotion to Mary, were inferior to Protestant religion, which emphasized dogma, belief, and ascetic spirituality.