John Neumann

Neumann entered the school in a class of 103 students, of whom less than fifty ultimately completed the six-year gymnasium course. The curriculum included Latin, mathematics, geography, history, and Christian doctrine in the first four years and was devoted to Latin and Greek classical authors in the last two years. Neumann was disappointed with the course's slow pace in his first years and thought he might easily have been able to advance to the third year, but this was not allowed. In the middle of the third year, Neumann's professor was dismissed for appearing before a public gathering while drunk and was replaced with a much stricter man who was resolved to make up for lost time and was very inclined to teaching by rote learning, a method Neumann disliked. The pace now became too fast for many students, and about twenty of Neumann's classmates dropped out, but he persevered and passed the examination that year with a fair average, as he had the two previous years.[8]

Neumann's grades suffered in the fourth year while he was boarding in Budweis with a woman whose son disturbed him in his studies. Neumann's father, observing that he seemed to have lost interest in his studies, initially encouraged him to stay home and choose a trade. Still, his mother and his sister Veronica pressured him to persevere in his studies. His father's ideas changed upon having a professor who happened to be vacationing in Prachatitz examine his son and finding Neumann had made greater academic progress than his grades revealed. Upon moving to a new boarding house where he could enjoy greater solitude and quiet, Neumann's grades distinctly improved, except in his only weak subject, mathematics. Though the professor of classics was even stricter than the second mentor, Neumann found the study of the humanities very agreeable and achieved the highest grades of his career up to that time in his final term at the gymnasium. Neumann's hobbies at this time included playing the guitar and making images with a pantograph.[9]

After completing the gymnasium course in 1829, Neumann began two years of study in philosophy in the same building but under different instructors, the Cistercian monks of Hohenfurth Abbey. The subjects taught at the Philosophical Institute included philosophy, religion, higher mathematics, the natural sciences, and Latin philology. Neumann attained a better than fair average in philosophy, philology, and mathematics, fully overcoming his earlier weakness in the latter. He excelled in botany and astronomy, forming a club with fellow students to discuss scientific subjects in their spare time.[10]

Upon graduating from the philosophical course in the late summer of 1831, Neumann was faced with becoming a physician, a lawyer, or a priest. Finding himself with more of a taste for science and secular poetry than theology and the mystics, and discouraged by the difficulty of admission to the seminary, especially with no influential friends to recommend him, Neumann was initially inclined to study medicine, and his father was prepared to pay the tuition for medical school. His mother, however, sensing that his real desire was to be a priest, encouraged him to apply to the seminary even without testimonials from influential people, and to his surprise, he was accepted.[11]

Neumann entered the seminary of the Diocese of Budweis on November 1, 1831.[12] Neumann's first two years studying theology were happy, stimulating days for him. Studying ecclesiastical history, Biblical archaeology, and introduction to and exegesis of the Old Testament in his first year, he received the highest possible grade, eminentem, in every subject, including diligence and conduct. At the end of his first year, he was one of the few men in his class permitted to take tonsure and minor orders. In his second year at Budweis, Neumann studied Biblical hermeneutics, philology, Greek, pedagogy, introduction to and exegesis of the New Testament, and canon law. His grades were again very good, receiving the highest grade in every subject except in one semester when he received the second-highest possible grade in pedagogy. In his spare time, he began to study French and worked to improve his command of Italian, which he had started to learn during his philosophy course, and of Czech.[13]

In his second year studying theology, Neumann began to read the reports of the Leopoldine Society on the need for priests in the United States, especially to serve the German-speaking communities there.[5] Inspired by a dramatic lecture given by the seminary director on the missionary activities of Paul the Apostle, Neumann and his friend Adalbert Schmidt both made up their minds to devote their lives to the missions after completing their seminary studies. Neither said a word to the other until Schmidt revealed his plan a few weeks later to Neumann, who teased his friend for the whole month before finally admitting, "I am going with you."[14]

Neumann's intention to go to America made it necessary to learn English, but there was no opportunity to do so in Budweis. The Bishop of Budweis had the privilege of sending two of his seminarians each year to study at the archiepiscopal seminary connected with the University of Prague. In the spring of 1833, Neumann successfully petitioned the bishop to continue his study of theology there, where he hoped to learn French and, more importantly, English. There is some indication that Neumann began to attend the university's lectures in French, but this became impossible when the state imposed new regulations in 1834 forbidding seminarians to go out for walks except for four hours a week, two on Tuesday afternoon and two on Thursday. Nevertheless, Neumann continued to study French independently and presented himself for the examination, managing to pass with a very high grade despite not attending all of the lectures. Neumann was disappointed that the university did not offer classes in English but studied independently from a book and by engaging in conversation with some English workmen at a nearby factory. After a year, he was capable of writing portions of his diary in English.[15]

Neumann found the lectures in Prague disagreeable because of the Febronian views of his professors, which Neumann regarded as heterodox. The lector in dogmatic theology, Jerome Zeidler, denied papal infallibility, which Neumann supported in a treatise he sent on the question to an inquiring friend in Budweis, though there is no evidence Neumann openly opposed Zeidler in class. Neumann said of Zeidler that he enjoyed too little reputation with the students to do them much harm. Neumann privately studied the Roman Catechism, the works of Robert Bellarmine and Peter Canisius, and the works of the Church Fathers, especially Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great. Neumann's grades at the end of the 1833–1834 academic year were once again very high, though not as high as at Budweis. In his final year at Prague, Neumann studied pastoral theology, homiletics, pedagogy, and catechetics. His grades, while good, were the lowest of his four years studying theology.[16] By this time, Neumann was able to use German, Czech, French, English, Spanish, and Italian, as well as Latin and Greek.[17]

Johann Stephen Raffeiner

The passengers came within sight of land on May 28, 1836, which was the eve of Trinity Sunday. The ship remained outside New York Harbor for another three days waiting for bad weather to abate and for some sick people aboard to recover lest quarantine officials require the captain to transport them back to Europe. Neumann, anxious to get ashore, was refused permission to disembark by the captain six times before he was finally let off in a rowboat on which he went to Staten Island. Several hours later, he took the small steamer Hercules to lower Manhattan. An hour before noon on the feast of Corpus Christi, Neumann stepped ashore with one tattered suit of clothes and one dollar in his pocket.[17] Neumann immediately sought out a Catholic church, and a Swiss innkeeper directed him to one where the pastor, Joseph A. Schneller, gave him the address of Bishop Dubois and John Raffeiner, the vicar-general of the Germans in New York, to whom Neumann went straightaway.[25]

Neumann was glad to learn from Raffeiner that a note had been sent to Canon Räss three weeks before saying he had been accepted as a priest for the Diocese of New York. Together, they went to the home of Bishop Dubois, who was urgently in need of German pastors. Dubois greeted Neumann and, having sufficient guarantees of Neumann's education in Europe, told him to immediately prepare for ordination. Neumann asked for some time for immediate preparation, which the bishop granted, as he was set to leave for a visitation. When Neumann told the bishop that he had no dimissorial letters, Dubois swept that difficulty aside, saying, "I can and must ordain you quickly for I need you." Raffeiner took Neumann to his parish, St. Nicholas Kirche, and put him to work teaching catechism to the children preparing for their First Communion.[26]

Dubois called Neumann for ordination seventeen days after his arrival, ordaining him at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral to the subdiaconate on June 19, the diaconate on Friday, June 24, and the priesthood on June 25.[12] Neumann celebrated his first Mass the next morning, Sunday, June 26, at St. Nicholas. "Oh Jesus, You poured out the fullness of your grace over me yesterday. You made me a priest and gave me the power to offer You up to God. Ah! God! This is too much for my soul! Angels of God, all you saints of heaven, come down and adore my Jesus because what my heart says is only the imperfect echo of what Holy Church tells me to say." He resolved, "I will pray to You that You may give to me holiness, and to all the living and the dead, pardon, that someday we may all be together with You, our dearest God!"[27]

The Diocese of New York at that time encompassed all of the State of New York and the upper third of New Jersey.[28] The diocese at that time was home to 200,000 Catholics whose numbers were rapidly being swelled by immigrants, for whom sufficient churches and priests were lacking. The diocese had thirty-three churches and several oratories, while fifty private homes served as temporary places of worship for lack of more suitable buildings. The diocese had thirty-six priests, of whom thirty-one were Irish and only three German, and needed at least fifteen priests more. Dubois, who Räss had informed that Neumann and his friends Adalbert Schmidt and John Savel all wanted to go to the American missions, was disappointed when only one man arrived. Still, his German parishes were growing quickly, and one was better than nothing.[29]

The Catholic hierarchy had been established in the United States only five decades earlier with the appointment of John Carroll as prefect-apostolic and then Bishop of Baltimore,[30] and until 1908, all of the United States was still regarded in the Catholic Church as mission territory under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (or Propaganda). There were no parishes in the strict sense, and in his own writings, Neumann always observed correct technical usage in referring to a portion of a diocese as a "mission," "congregation," or "quasi-parish."[31] However, places where he worked are often described by more recent writers as parishes.

After his ordination, Dubois assigned Neumann to assist Alexander Pax in serving recent German immigrants in the Buffalo area.[32] The more senior priest there, John Nicholas Mertz, was in Europe raising funds. Neumann departed on a Hudson River liner with new clothes given to him by Raffeiner and the bishop's funds for his travel expenses on June 28. Dubois wished Neumann to stop at Rochester before continuing to Buffalo. The German Catholics in Rochester were then holding services in the basement of St. Patrick's Church under the direction of Bernard O'Reilly. Still, as most of the Catholics in that area were Irish, they raised funds to build a separate church where they could be served in their native language.[33]

The German Catholics in Rochester were delighted by a German-speaking priest's arrival, and some planned to write to Bishop Dubois asking him to assign Neumann there permanently. Neumann began to teach the children, whom he found sadly neglected and unable to speak either German or English correctly and celebrate the sacraments. After administering his first baptism, he wrote in his journal, "If the child I baptized today dies in the grace of this sacrament, then my journey to America has been repaid a million times, even though I do nothing for the rest of my life." On the evening of Neumann's first Sunday in Rochester, he was relieved by the German Redemptorist Joseph Prost's arrival. The encounter with Prost first excited a desire in him to join the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer himself, although it was then only a passing thought. Neumann continued on to Buffalo on July 11.[34]

The missions in Buffalo were headquartered at a small church established by Mertz in 1829 known as the Church of the Lamb of God. There were four unfinished churches in the surrounding area at North Bush (the present-day parish of St. John the Baptist, now part of Tonawanda) eight miles to the north, at Williamsville eight miles to the northeast (now the parish of Ss. Peter and Paul), at Cayuga Creek, and thirty miles to the south at Eden. Pax was so grateful to have another priest to assist him in caring for the extensive territory that he offered Neumann any share of the work he desired, whether he preferred to work in the city where many of the faithful were concentrated or in the rural areas where Catholics were more dispersed. Neumann chose to station himself at Williamsville, from which he cared for an area of some twelve to fifteen miles around it where four hundred Catholic families lived, of whom three hundred were German. Because no pastoral residence had been constructed, Neumann took a room in the home of a wealthy benefactor of the mission, Jacob Philip Wirtz.[35]

The partially built church at Williamsville had been founded on land that had been donated to the Catholics on the condition that they would build a stone church, 115 feet long, thirty feet high, and twenty feet wide, a stipulation that was difficult to fulfill because the Catholics in the area were largely poor immigrants who were capable of giving little to the church. Mertz had been able to collect or borrow enough money, stone, and volunteer labor to erect four walls, but that was as far as construction had progressed. While Neumann said Mass for the first time in the roofless structure, some non-Catholics from the area threw stones into the church, one of which landed on the altar. Neumann completed this structure, inducing Wirtz to remit a loan he had made of $400 on the condition that a memorial Mass be said for him every year after his death.[36]

A little school was conducted in a neighboring house by a lay teacher appointed by Mertz. Still, Neumann, finding the man's conduct unsatisfactory, dismissed him and took up the task of teaching himself, two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, until securing the services of another teacher seven months later. Neumann was a gifted teacher, and his students fondly remembered his stories in catechism class years later. He would often reward good students with small gifts, and when teaching the children to sing in the liturgy, he would induce those who complained of sore throats to return to singing with rock candy, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. Neumann again had a school after moving his headquarters to North Bush in 1837 and was erecting a third schoolhouse at Lancaster by December 1839.[12]

Although Neumann's principal missions were Williamsville, Lancaster, and North Bush, he was soon caring for Transit, Sheldon, Batavia, Pendleton, and Tonawanda. For over four years, he was always on the move, traveling on foot often over swampy ground, from station to station, from house to house, in the biting cold of winter and the heat of summer, visiting the sick, aiding the dying, baptizing the newborn, instilling faith and zeal into the backsliders. In the three main churches under his care, the baptisms averaged sixty-five a year and the marriages eight. Still, Neumann's workload was heavy, particularly in virtue of the considerable distances to be traversed on foot, with a heavy pack on his back containing his vestments. The nearest out-mission was two hours away, the furthest twelve hours, and it was necessary to return home to North Bush almost every night, as there were no accommodations at the outposts, and besides, Neumann needed to be at home to teach every day.[12]

The figure of the short-statured man of God was familiar to all the countryside. Out of pity for his exhausting labors, they soon induced him to take a horse. People laughed at the clumsy way Neumann rode; because he was only 5 ft 2+1⁄2 in (1.59 m), his feet did not reach the stirrups.[17] Once, Neumann found himself thrown off the horse's back. On several other occasions when the horse wanted to rid himself of his rider, the animal made for the nearby fences and brushed Neumann's legs against them so that the cleric fell ignominiously to the ground. After that, Neumann led the horse along by the bridle instead of riding until he learned to control the stubborn creature. But Neumann did learn to ride, not in the manner of an expert but as a fair horseman. He and his horse eventually became great friends, even though on one occasion the voracious animal ate a precious quantity of botanical specimens the missionary had collected to send home to Bohemia.[37]

Here, Neumann had his first difficulties with lay trusteeism. In many American Catholic congregations, the title to the church property was placed in the hands of lay members who formed a majority of the parish corporation and often sought to act independently of the pastor and contrary to the traditional administration of parish concerns. It took the ecclesiastical hierarchy many years to eradicate the disturbances caused by this system. In Neumann's day, the trustees were the important people in a parish, and it was vitally important for a pastor to get along well with them. Neumann refrained from open arguments with contentious trustees, and no matter what they said, he would smile and say nothing, which more than one trustee regarded as disrespectful. One of these resentful trustees once spread gossip concerning the propriety of Neumann's lodging in the home of Wirtz, which was over a tavern and in a room that could only be entered by going through the room of a young servant girl. One day, Neumann was called down to a meeting of the trustees in the tavern below Wirtz's house and informed that the meeting's purpose was to decide whether Wirtz should be obliged to dismiss the servant girl. Neumann, astounded though he was, responded with only a wry smile and a quiet disavowal. The trustees were convinced the bashful and holy priest was entirely innocent and blamed the jealous neighbor who wanted Neumann to lodge with his family instead of Wirtz's. Soon the man lost prestige in the neighborhood. Nevertheless, the danger of such gossip was not lost on Neumann, and he quietly changed his residence in 1837 to North Bush, though the church was not nearly so good as the one in Williamsville. He accepted free lodgings from a friendly Catholic, John Schmidt, who lived a mile and a half from the church, which Neumann had to walk every morning over an almost impassable road to say his daily Mass.[38]

The move from Williamsville to North Bush came when the entire region was sunk in the direst poverty by the depression that followed upon the Panic of 1837. Many of the area's Catholics were without work and often without food and could give little or nothing to support the church. Neumann wrote to a fellow priest in Europe, "If you want to be a missionary, you have to love poverty and be entirely disinterested." Though he found himself $80 in debt at the end of the first year, he was satisfied that thanks to the people's gifts of corn and potatoes; he did not starve. Shortly after the move to North Bush, Bishop Dubois arrived on a visitation tour of the district. He expressed his pleasure upon seeing the more advanced stage of the buildings, the schools, the careful attention to the sick and the dying, and the weekly, even daily rounds made by the young pastor.[39]

Wenzel Neumann, who followed his brother to America

In North Bush, the people got together and bought five acres of land close to the church on which Neumann could build a house and grow some vegetables for his support. Neumann worked at times on this and other buildings with his own hands and rejoiced when he moved into the two-room log cabin. After Neumann had his own house, he cooked his meals, and often he missed meals; observers noticed smoke rarely rose from Neumann's chimney, meaning the stove was not being used. Once, he lived only on bread for four weeks. People also noticed that when he visited the homes of the faithful, he never asked for a meal. Although Neumann's efforts to recruit additional priests from Europe were unsuccessful, in September 1839, Neumann's brother Wenzel came from Bohemia to assist him, taking over the cooking and teaching in the school, as well as helping with the construction of the churches, schoolhouses, and rectories. Wenzel brought Neumann the first news he'd had of his family in three years, for no letter of theirs had reached him since he left Europe. Neumann loved his family intensely, and Wenzel's coming to help him was a godsend.[40]

Neumann began to experience spiritual aridity and feared his love for God was growing less fervent. Neumann saw pride in himself though everyone else said he was humble and thought he was slothful. Still, people around Buffalo said long after that he burned himself out making the rounds of his parish. After Neumann discussed his spiritual difficulties with Prost, Prost wrote to him that living alone is difficult, quoting Ecclesiastes, "woe to him who is alone!" Neumann often revolved that thought in his mind, especially in the summer of 1840 when his health broke down completely, and he was unable to do any pastoral work for three months. Neumann declared that he had an intense longing for the company of other priests.[41] Frequent consultations with his confessor, Pax, followed, and after a long time, Pax advised Neumann that it was his vocation to become a religious.

On September 4, 1840, Neumann wrote to Prost, the Redemptorists' superior in America, asking for admission to the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. Receiving a favorable reply from Prost on September 16, Neumann immediately wrote to Bishop John Hughes, acquainting him with his desire to enter the Redemptorists and asking him to send one or more priests to take over the churches outside Buffalo. Unbeknownst to Neumann, the bishop was on visitation, so no reply was forthcoming. Still, leaving the negotiations with Hughes in Pax and Prost's hands as they advised, Neumann left the Buffalo area on October 8 or 9, 1840. When Hughes learned of the matter, he was not at all inclined to allow a pastor of Neumann's caliber to depart from his diocese, but Prost later wrote, "I appealed to canon law and pointed out that I could not refuse to accept him, even if I wished to. The Most Reverend Bishop was obliged to yield." His brother, Wenzel, stayed to gather up the few belongings that Neumann possessed in the various mission stations and resolved to follow his brother and become a lay brother of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer.[42]

The Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, popularly known as the Redemptorists, had been founded in Naples in 1732 by Alphonsus Liguori, and had grown only slowly during its founder's lifetime. Clement Hofbauer established the Congregation north of the Alps. Joseph Passerat, who ran the Congregation from 1820 to 1848 dispatched the first Redemptorist missionaries to America in 1832. They had secured their first foundation in Pittsburgh in April 1839, taking over St. Philomena's Church. When Neumann joined them, they had four foundations: St. Philomena's in Pittsburgh, St. John's in Baltimore, St. Joseph's in Rochester, and St. Alphonsus' in Norwalk, Ohio.[43]

Neumann arrived in Pittsburgh and presented himself to the Redemptorists on the morning of Sunday, October 18, 1840, where he was invited on the first day to sing the High Mass and preach, which he did despite the fatigue of his long journey from Buffalo. The matter of dimissorial letters having been straightened out with Bishop Hughes, Prost hurried to Pittsburgh to invest Neumann with the Redemptorist habit. As this was the first investiture of a Redemptorist in the New World, the Fathers wished to make it a solemn occasion. Unfortunately, they lacked the ritual of the prescribed ceremonies and prayers, as their only copies of these had been destroyed in a fire in New York. Drawing on their memories of their investitures, they devised a suitable ceremony and proceeded to clothe him in the Redemptorist habit.[41]

He took his religious vows as a member of the congregation in Baltimore, in January 1842. While a novice for the Redemptorists, he served at St. Alphonsus Church in Peru Township, Huron County, Ohio for five months before returning to New York.[44] He was naturalized as a United States citizen in Baltimore on February 10, 1848. He served as the pastor of St. Augustine Church in Elkridge, Maryland, from 1849 to 1851.[45]

After six years of difficult but fruitful work in Maryland, Neumann became the Provincial Superior for the United States. He also served as parish priest at St. Alphonsus Church in Baltimore.[46]

In 1854, Neumann traveled to Rome and was present at St. Peter's Basilica on December 8, when Pius IX solemnly defined, ex cathedra, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He visited Prachatice for a week from February 3 1855. Although he wanted this to be done quietly the citizens greeted him lavishly on arrival. The visit is noted next to his baptismal record in the parish register alongside a later pencil note about his canonisation in 1977.[1]

While doing errands on Thursday, January 5, 1860, Neumann collapsed and died on a Philadelphia street. He was 48 years old. He was buried, per his request, at St. Peter's Church beneath the undercroft floor directly below the high altar.

Bishop James Frederick Wood, a Philadelphia native who converted to Catholicism in Cincinnati in 1836 and who had been appointed Neumann's coadjutor with right of succession in 1857, succeeded Neumann as Bishop of Philadelphia.