Remembering Father Schoenmakers
On 28 July, we marked the death of an early Jesuit missionary, Father John Schoenmakers. He died in 1883, late on a Saturday afternoon, in Osage Mission, now known as St. Paul, Kansas.
He was in the 76th year of age, the 50th year of his priesthood, the 49th year as a Jesuit, and the 36th year of his service in Kansas. His place gave birth to my place, the home parish where I grew up. My work brought me to live, for some months in his place, on the very spot where he founded his Mission. I was drawn again and again to his grave in that tiny parish cemetery. He fills that whole place still.
“There was nothing dynamic about the man, nor was he unusually gifted,” an historian said. I am not an individual, he said in a letter to his Superiors, I am an institution. The first was submerged in the last.
Superior of the local community, manager of the Mission, spiritual Father to the Sisters of Loretto, doctor, postmaster, steward, lawyer, judge, catechist, preacher to the Native Americans, he submerged himself … effaced himself … in his work, rarely spending time in his own rooms, and rarely leaving the Mission compound.
His Jesuit Superiors were not always pleased with him. They were forever reprimanding him about his spending, forever reminding him to stay within his budget, forever shaking their heads at his seeming inability to understand and to follow instructions. Some members of the Mission community found him too driven, too exacting, and too apt to interfere in their own work, which perplexed and discouraged them.
But the members of the Osage Tribe, they came to love him with a fierce loyalty. They had only a living oral language, passed down from person to person, no written language. And when they came to make their own word for “priest,” the sound they chose was Schouminka. His name, his presence, his energy, his work … he was priest to them. We should all be so lucky.