After a 6,700-mile sojourn, 37-year-old Fr. Mazzuchelli returned to his family’s home on the
Piazza of the Duomo in Milan to a much-changed family. His father had died. Many siblings had
married and raised families. Though his original intention had been to recuperate, his sabbatical
was a year of intense activity. He laid the groundwork for a return to the United States,
assembling new resources and establishing new goals.
He became an advocate for the American people, their society and their spiritual needs. He published articles on Dubuque and the progress of Catholicism in America. He wrote a 375-page book detailing his 14-year missionary experience, hoping to inspire others to share his work across the Atlantic or to donate to the cause. Reflecting his true humility, he composed the memoirs in the third person, perhaps in an attempt to deflect any sense of his own heroics. Throughout his life, Fr. Mazzuchelli would tell no one in America (except a few church supervisors) that he wrote this well-reviewed book.
Fr. Mazzuchelli’s most ambitious pursuit while in Milan, however, was to gain permission to found a new Dominican province, just the second in all of the United States. Although there were limited resources and structure to support a Midwestern American province, Fr. Mazzuchelli provided strong arguments for it: to train new priests for the region; to establish Catholic schools; and to create a place for Dominicans in the area to partake of the communal life that is central to their order. The Holy See granted Fr. Mazzuchelli’s requests just days after his 37th birthday. A few months later, he was appointed Commissary of the Master General, which gave him authority to found communities of friars and sisters.
Fr. Mazzuchelli soon returned to the United States and called on George Wallace Jones, the first Wisconsin delegate to Congress. Jones owned desirable property 10 miles north of Galena, just into Wisconsin. The area had been known as Manitoumie, or the dwelling place of the Great Spirit, to the native people, and they called the mound near the Mississippi river Sinsinawa, or home of the young eagle. About a month before his 38th birthday, Fr. Mazzuchelli made a down payment on 500 acres, using funds donated by his family and friends in Italy.
Within days, the first local resident joined the community, a German immigrant, and together the men landscaped, organized the relocation of a church onto the grounds and invited others to join them. Fr. Mazzuchelli’s newly ordained nephew, Francis, soon arrived. In spite of this progress, Fr. Mazzuchelli was worried by how much remained to be accomplished. On this 39th birthday, he wrote “Today is the day of my birth; instead of it being a day of joy for me it is one of sadness, because it makes me think seriously of the many years spent uselessly, and of the account I must soon make to that God who has given me life. The few days that remain of my life are all the capital that I still have to put to profit in the payment of my spiritual debts.”
He used this emotional burden of leadership to drive the community’s multiple projects forward. That spring, they laid the cornerstone of Sinsinawa Mound College, an event that brought visitors from great distances. Fr. Mazzuchelli had designed the building and even worked with masons to quarry the limestone. When the people realized that Fr. Mazzuchelli had withheld his name from the cornerstone, they insisted that his name be carved into the stone. Even before the building was completed and proper books acquired, boys began to live and study at the Mound.
The Order dispatched three friars from Italy to assist Fr. Mazzuchelli, but after they arrived, it became clear that they were prepared for neither community life nor frontier hardships. When the trio left the Mound, Fr. Mazzuchelli grew convinced that he was not fit to govern.
By his 41st birthday he had asked to resign from all positions of authority and to return to missionary work. However, four women from the local parish asked Fr. Mazzuchelli to receive them into the Order, initiating the Sinsinawa Dominican Congregation of the Most Holy Rosary. He referred to the women as the “four cornerstones” of a new community and insisted they be made its directors when it was incorporated even though Wisconsin legislators were reluctant to grant such power to women.
Over the next decade, he composed their profession ceremony, drafted the community’s Rule (which outlines an active, non-cloistered life), protested when their duties became domestic work for the friars instead of teaching, and urged them toward a mission-oriented structure, reporting not to friars but directly to the bishop. While the province of Dominican men did not endure, and Fr. Mazzuchelli formally renounced his position as commissioner provincial shortly before his 43rd birthday, it was through his efforts to inspire and guide the women that his leadership established a long-flowering shoot of the vine originally planted by St. Dominic.
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