Pioneer Bishops of North Dakota

This blog will discuss bishops that served in North Dakota up to 1900.  For more information about North Dakota, see my blog of March 12, 2017.

French Canadian explorers, Pierre and Francois Verendrye, came to the area that is now North Dakota around 1740, accompanied by a Jesuit priest, Father Coquart.  However, the first Catholic missionary activity in the area did not take place until 1818 when the Bishop of Quebec, J. Octave Plessis, sent two priests—Joseph Provencher and Josef Severe Dumoulin—to Fort Douglas, now St. Boniface, Manitoba.  Later that year, Father Dumoulin established a mission at Pembina in what is now North Dakota.  He was recalled to Quebec when it was determined that Pembina was in the United States—a portion of eastern North Dakota did not become part of the United States until 1818.

Starting in 1831, Father George Belcourt ministered to the needs of the early Catholic settlers and became a missionary to the Native Americans.  He composed a grammar book and dictionary in the Algonquin language.  Father Pierre DeSmet, a Jesuit, ministered to the Mandan and Gros Ventre tribes from 1840 to 1870.  Father Jean Baptiste Marie Genin established a mission at Fort Totten in 1865.  The Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns) of Montreal under Sr. Mary Clapin built a school there in 1874 for the Dakota tribe.  Various priests served as chaplains at Fort Totten, including Father Jerome Hunt, O.S.B., who wrote several publications in the Dakota language, such as a Bible history, prayer books, and hymnals.  In 1850, Pope Pius IX made the Dakotas east of the Missouri River part of the Diocese of St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Dakotas west of the Missouri River part of the vast Vicariate Apostolic of the Indian Territory East of the Rocky Mountains. 

The Dakota Territory (consisting of what is now South Dakota and North Dakota) was established in 1861, and in 1879, Pope Leo XIII named Abbot Martin Marty, OSB, of St. Meinrad's Abbey in Indiana to be Vicar Apostolic of the Territory.  Irish Catholics started coming to North Dakota to build railroads in the 1870s and 1880s and they were soon followed by other immigrant groups, especially Germans in western North Dakota.

North Dakota became a State in 1889 and in the same year, Pope Leo XIII created the Diocese of Jamestown to serve all of North Dakota.  The first bishop of Jamestown, John Shanley, moved his see to the much larger city of Fargo in 1897.  North Dakota’s population increased from 320,000 in 1900 to 577,000 in 1910.  To deal with this growth, Pope Pius X created the Diocese of Bismarck in 1909 to serve western North Dakota.

John Shanley was born in the State of New York in 1852 and moved with his family to Minnesota in 1857.  He was an altar server at the Cathedral of St. Paul before attending college at St. John’s in Minnesota.  After graduating in 1869, he was sent to Rome for further seminary training and traveled to Rome with John Ireland, the future first Archbishop of St. Paul.  Shanley was ordained a priest for the Diocese of St. Paul in 1874 and returned to Minnesota in 1882.  He served as pastor for the Cathedral and held various diocesan positions under Ireland, who had become Bishop of St. Paul.  Shanley also made sure that minorities and the poor were served by the Diocese.  He was named the first Bishop of Jamestown, South Dakota, in 1889, which then consisted of the entire State.  Shanley found it difficult to govern the Diocese from Jamestown, so he moved to Fargo in 1891, although the diocese did not become the Diocese of Fargo until 1897.  (Fargo was and is substantially larger than Jamestown.)

Bishop Shanley was an effective defender of the Faith in a state that was largely Protestant and anti-Catholic.  He served as Bishop at a time of great growth with the Catholic population of North Dakota increasing from 30,000 to 70,000, many foreign-born.  As a result, he built more than 150 churches, including the Cathedral of St. Mary in Fargo.  Construction on the Cathedral was delayed due to a fire that destroyed much of downtown Fargo.  Bishop Shanley donated substantially to reconstruction of the downtown area.  He also opened more than two dozen schools and three hospitals, run by religious orders.  He had special concern about the spiritual, material, and educational needs of those in rural areas and of Native Americans living on reservations.  He also strongly supported the temperance movement and social reforms and began a diocesan newspaper.  He died in his sleep in 1909.