Bishop Martin Marty's ordeal in the garden

Bishop Martin Marty

To the Lakota people, they were the "black robes," the crazily-overdressed white men who, as if out of nowhere, moved in among them to teach the white man's religion. The Benedictines, led by Father Martin Marty, who would become the Vicar Apostolic of Dakota Territory and eventually the Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Paul, wore black robes long before they came to America, in fact identified themselves by their thick, black robes and wore them, well, religiously.

Mostly.

If you believe the histories, Father Marty, who would eventually be known as "the Apostle of the Sioux," not by the Sioux perhaps, but by his Catholic constituency, was something of a stickler for tradition, certain aspects of tradition at least. Early on, back in his native Switzerland, he stood fast on tradition, maintaining, against significant opposition, that other Benedictines should sing absolutely nothing but ye olde blessed Gregorian chants. 

When he came to America (at age 26) to take over a failing abbey at St. Meinrad, Indiana, he ordered all the brothers to wear the black habits all the time. Some of the brothers weren't particularly thrilled and murmured a bit--and with good reason. If you worked in the fields, picking weeds, thinning carrots, doing anything in the hot sun, those huge and heavy black robes were a heckuva encumbrance. They weren't rebelling--they were Benedictines, after all. They simply wanted to make a case for having Abbot Martin lighten up a little.

Besides, they said, all that heavy sweat made the black dye run into their unholy underwear, even stained their skin. All in all, those famous black robes were an encumbrance to their piety, they claimed.

Abbot Martin listened to their complaints and in no uncertain terms told them such claims were not sufficient to warrant their mutual abandoning of the kinds of robes Benedictines wore, plain and simple. Abandoning robes would be akin to abandoning vows. No, no, he told them, thou shalt continue to don the habit identified with your vows. 

And you know what else, he said, I'll show you you're wrong.

Now his biographers claim that good Father Marty was opinionated to a fault and given to making seemingly arbitary rulings on a whim. The ancient testimonies also maintain that he was no phony. The spiritual and physical rigors he demanded of his brothers, he did himself. 

So to prove them wrong, in the heat of the day, Father Marty himself did hard labor in the Abbey's fields, honorably dressed in the robes he claimed to be at the religious heart of the brothers' spiritual identity. He picked up a hoe or a pitchfork and spent most of day--maybe even two or three--sweating like a wrestler. 

And promptly changed the rules. 

Lo and behold, when he got to his room and lifted that huge robe off his sweaty torso, he found himself bedecked in blackened underwear. One look at his stained skivvees, and the tough-guy conservative conceded to a whole new way in a new world. 

But then there's this too. When the Sacred Heart Convent picked up and left Yankton, for just a few years the academy building became a boarding school of Indian boys, whose musical repertoire, of course, included Gregorian chants.

Wouldn't you know.