Catholic Ladders and Native American Evangelization

Saints Peter, Paul, and Augustine successfully proclaimed the Christian God to the Greco-Roman world. They did this by presenting concise and tangible glimpses of their God as an active agent within human history who guided humanity to salvation. They described a monotheistic and Trinitarian God and focused on the essential Christian belief in Jesus. By building on the people’s existing concepts, symbols, and language, the earliest missionaries overcame cultural and linguistic barriers and introduced to Gentile audiences a new concept of the Messiah. They also avoided complex moral and theological concepts and made no assumptions about a people’s existing religious ideas.¹

Many missionaries were pragmatists. In order to communicate new religious teachings, they invented and borrowed whatever visual aids they needed. One such device, the Catholic ladder,² resembled a ladder and was a thematic sequence of symbols or pictures for instructing candidates on how to achieve heaven. It may have taken its inspiration from Jacob’s ladder, one of the Bible’s best known symbolic pathways between heaven and earth. Jacob dreamt of a ladder that was set upon the earth and its top reached to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. In describing his intercessory role to Nathanael, Jesus used the symbolism of Jacob’s ladder “. . . hereafter you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”³ An ancient variation also used in Catholic ladders is the “two roads” from the Didache or the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles. It begins, “There are two Ways, one of life and one of death, and there is much difference between the two Ways.”⁴

Native American cultures favored visual learning, which contributed to the success of Catholic ladders as catechetical aids and was so reported by The Indian Sentinel, a Catholic fund-raising magazine. Courtesy Marquette University (Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records).

In Eastern North America, the Jesuits were the first evangelizers from 1610 to 1791. Anxious to trade with the French, many Native Americans were hospitable to the Jesuits who maximized their opportunity to convert them by inventing new strategies through trial and error experimentation. To convey the Christian message, the Jesuits had to clarify and simplify it in ways similar to the Greco-Roman evangelizers, which necessitated extensive study of the peoples’ languages. As needed, the Jesuits drew impromptu pictures in the soil, on bark, and on paper, and they regularly distributed instructional aids, such as pictures, rosaries, religious medals, and card games. Many of the pictures conveyed concepts of heaven, hell, and the last judgment with sharp contrasts between the outcomes of the saved and the condemned. Typically heaven featured tranquil scenes of angels and the Virgin Mary whereas hell swarmed with snakes.⁵

In 1637 near Québec, the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune reported on his instructing of Makheabichtichiou, a Montagnais Indian leader. Le Jeune had presented him with a chronological summary of Christian salvation, which Makheabichtichiou reviewed by sketching the principal points in order. Le Jeune noted that, “[He] . . . took a pencil and marked upon the ground the different periods in their order, ‘Here is he who made all, he begins in this place to create the Angels and the world; there he created the first man and the first woman; see how the race of men, increasing, divides, and offends God; here is the deluge, here are the Prophets,’—in short, he came up to our own time. . . .”

Makheabichtichiou’s concise but matter-of-fact summary reflected the prevailing egalitarian nature of Native American societies in the Northeast. In contrast, Le Jeune, who was the Jesuit superior of Québec and a convert himself, sought a compelling procedure that would strongly persuade candidates to choose Christian teachings over their existing beliefs. At the time the Jesuits experienced great difficulty in persuading their Native neophytes. They were anxious to create compelling and productive approaches, so Le Jeune looked elsewhere and declined to build on Makheabichtichiou’s model.⁶

However, the Jesuits created other innovative elements that were...