Other Faribault Religious Monuments : Jesus Statue in Peace Park

The first time that I came to the Thomas Scott Buckham Memorial Library in Faribault, Minnesota, I didn’t even notice the tall, white statue of Jesus that stood just down the hill, on a small triangle of land separated from the Library grounds by a right-hand turn lane. I only realized it was there on my second visit when I went down the hill for a wider angle on my photograph of the Library complex.

Venturing down the hill, camera in hand, I went to photograph the statue, a white marble Jesus in a traditional robe, hands outstretched and palms upturned.

As I did, a truck drove by and a passenger yelled out at me, “Don’t do that!” I continued on to my scheduled interview at the complex, which houses the public library, the community center, and the parks and recreation department. When I asked my interviewee about the statue, they responded that they didn’t know anything about the statue, but that it was in Peace Park, and that it was city property.

In another later interview, with the director of the complex, Paul J. Peanasky, I learned that the statue had been removed recently by the Knights of Columbus for cleaning and that this had inspired the most agitated phone calls and complaints out of any other city issue that he could recall. Peanasky speculated about the potential community reaction to the removal of the Ten Commandments monolith:

"I think there would be more of an outcry if we took [the Ten Commandments monument] down than if we left it up. When the Jesus statue in Peace Park was taken down for cleaning, we got more complaints then than we ever have for any other monument."

This statue of Jesus, as well as the monument to the Ten Commandments, in combination with a Nativity erected in front of the complex every fall, all seem to point to the government's endorsement of Christian values.

The known history of this object is recorded in the city of Faribault’s microfiche archives of city council minutes. The statue was approved at the regular city council meeting on February 8, 1944, well before the end of World War II.

The Daughters of Isabella, a charitable Catholic women’s organization, the counterpart to the Knights of Columbus, which is still active today, had requested permission to erect a “Christian type memorial on Faribault Library Park” (today known as Peace Park), in memory of the fallen soldiers of World War II. It was accepted unanimously by the city council.

The Jesus and the Ten Commandments statues were both gifts, donated to the city of Faribault in the 1940s and 50s, and both hold deep sentimental and historical value, ostensibly detached from a religious perspective. Still, the overt Christian symbolism on city property raises interesting questions about the interplay between religion and government.