I. NIAGARA MISSIONS

At eleven o'clock on Thursday morning, June 2, 1836, a short, stocky young man stepped off the harbor steamer, Hercules, onto terra firma in lower Manhattan, New York City. He was a Bohemian whose mother tongue was German; and he was twenty-five years old. Despite his halting English, he had just talked his way out of quarantine aboard the three-masted schooner, Europa, on which, as an immigrant, he had spent forty uncomfortable days between Le Havre and Staten Island.

In his pocket the young man had the equivalent of a dollar. It was raining. He was hatless, and his clothes were shabby. But in his baggage he had papers identifying him as John Nepomucene Neumann of Prachatitz, Bohemia. The documents stated that he had successfully completed four years of theological studies in the Seminary of Budweis and at the University of Prague, but stopped at that. The young man had not been ordained a priest because the Austro-Hungarian government told the Bishop of Budweis that he had too many priests already.

In the 1840s, Little Old New York had some three hundred thousand inhabitants huddled in a babel of tongues at the lower end of Manhattan Island. Scurrying about the cobble-stoned streets of this blustering metropolis, the young immigrant was totally confused. He simply could not find a Catholic church. Despite his familiarity with several languages, including French and English, he got thoroughly lost. Exhausted, he found refuge in the Swiss Tavern on Washington Street where he lodged for the night.

Neumann depicted as a frontier priest, one of a series of stained-glass windows in St. Peter's Church, Philadelphia.

The next day he was directed to a nearby Catholic priest, Father Joseph Schneller, and put in touch with the pastor of St. Nicholas Church on Second Street. There Father John Raffeiner received him with great joy. To young Mr. Neumann's relief, both Father Raffeiner and the bishop, John Dubois, were awaiting him. New York badly needed priests to care for the German Catholic immigrants coming to the United States in droves. Three weeks earlier, Bishop Dubois had sent him a letter saying he would be most welcome in the Diocese of New York.

Neumann hardly had time to grasp the good news when he was whisked into the bishop's presence. The aging prelate's pleasure was complete when he discovered that the newcomer was not only fluent in German, but well-trained theologically, and of a scholarly turn of mind. One of his pressing concerns was a packet of books sent by freight from Paris that should have been awaiting him in New York.

Bishop Dubois suggested ordaining Neumann at once. But, despite his eagerness to enter the priesthood, the young man demurred. He felt he needed a little time for spiritual preparation. As Dubois was scheduled to be out of town for a few days, it was decided that the ordination would take place immediately upon his return.

Meanwhile, Father Raffeiner could hardly believe the bishop's good fortune in obtaining a cleric so exquisitely trained in the older European tradition, who was full of news about the Church and the imperial court of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and anxious to get involved in missionary work in the new world. Guiding him to his residence on Second Street, Father Raffeiner put young Mr. Neumann to work. He asked him to instruct some thirty youngsters who were being prepared for their First Holy Communion. He also took him to a tailor and bought him a new wardrobe.

On June 19th, Neumann was ordained a subdeacon by Bishop Dubois in old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mott Street. On the 24th, he was made a deacon, and the following day, Saturday, June 25th, he was raised to the priesthood. The next morning, Father Neumann celebrated his first Mass in the Church of St. Nicholas and gave Communion to the group of children whom he had instructed. H is joy was complete. In a letter to his family back home in Prachatitz, he described his happiness at achieving his goal. But in his diary, he confessed his sorrow that his father, mother, sisters and brother were not on hand to share his joy.

Two days later, equipped with a knapsack for his chalice, altar stone, wine and vestments, and two large leather valises with his worldly possessions, Father John Neumann took passage on the Hudson River day steamer. He was headed for Buffalo via Albany and Rochester.

In Albany, he was well received by the local Catholic pastor, a Dominican priest, Father John Urquhart. Father Neumann said Mass for the first time unaided by another priest. Then he boarded the canal tow-boat, Indiana, for the long haul to Rochester. The young priest had been told by Bishop Dubois to tarry there for a few days caring for the spiritual needs of the local German immigrants.

In Rochester, Neumann had his first brush with the realities of priestly life after the euphoria of his ordination. Considerable bitterness had broken out between the Irish parishioners of St. Patrick's Church and the new German immigrants in the parish. The newcomers' spiritual wants were tended to in the basement of the church. To defuse this situation, the Germans had been urged by Father Joseph Prost, a Redemptorist missionary, to build their own church with the promise that he would come and serve as its pastor. Bishop Dubois agreed to this arrangement and instructed Neumann to remain in Rochester until Prost arrived.

Cordially welcomed by Father Bernard O'Reilly, the flamboyant pastor of St. Patrick's, young Neumann was put into a state of spiritual shock when, in a conversation with several local priests, he was informed that his ordination to the priesthood was probably unlawful. Bishop Dubois had not waited for an official letter from the Bishop of Budweis, granting permission for his ordination.

The very next day, he was told by a trustee of the German parish that he was too young and inexperienced to take spiritual charge of Rochester's Germans. Nevertheless, he said Sunday Mass, heard confessions, preached, and instructed the young children. To his relief, Father Prost arrived that very evening, and after removing the young priest's doubts saw him off for Buffalo on a mule-drawn canal boat. Considering Neumann's delicacy of conscience, Prost also suggested that, eventually, he might consider joining a religious order where he would have the companionship of other priests.

Neumann arrived in Buffalo at sunset on July 12th. Met at the wharf by Father Alexander Pax, the city's sole Catholic priest, he quickly realized why Bishop Dubois had dispatched him to this pioneer situation. He was young, vigorous, and full of zeal, just the man needed to shore up the failing strength of the ever-burdened Pax.

As a gateway to the West, Buffalo was a madhouse of activity where lake steamers, the Erie Canal, stagecoaches and the large horse-drawn Conestoga wagons were continually loading and unloading people and merchandise headed for the unclaimed territory of middle America. The city itself was a beehive of building and banking, swindling and hard living. In its midst, there was a fairly large, scattered community of Catholics attempting to stabilize their lives and provide their children with the education and religious customs they had known in the old country. As a large proportion of the immigrants was German-speaking, Neumann's arrival was a godsend to the overwhelmed Father Pax.

The older priest welcomed him heartily and after introducing him to the complexities of his congested city parish, offered to let him stay in Buffalo while he, Pax, would take over the responsibilities of the scattered settlements outside. Neumann would not hear of it.

In a crescent of some nine hundred square miles stretching from Batavia and Niagara Falls through Buffalo down to Erie, hundreds of new settlers were clearing the forests and working feverishly to establish farms and homes. This was Neumann's parish.

Before his departure for the wilderness, Father Pax had shown him a map of the city's environs. There were four principal settlements where mission stations had been started. North Bush was some eight miles to the north; it had a blockhouse style church built of unfinished logs, as did a nearby settlement at Cayuga Creek; and there was a third log church at Eden, thirty miles to the south of the city. The most promising site seemed to be Williamsville, twelve miles east of Buffalo, where there was an unfinished stone structure.

Neumann chose Williamsville for his residence and rented a room in the Jacob Wirtz home over a tavern. Reconnoitering the situation, he decided that his first care should be the religious education of the children; the second, to complete the building of the church which was roofless. Objection to the latter plan was eliminated when, during his first Sunday Mass, stones were lobbed into the unroofed edifice by local urchins.

In long letters home and to his benefactors in Budweis, Neumann described the conditions of his frontier parish and his experiences. Many of these letters were published in bulletins of the Leopoldine Society of Vienna, an organization that supported foreign missions, creating a link between the church at home and its efforts overseas.

Neumann entered the Seminary of Budweis

Making acquaintance with the people of his principal settlements, Neumann discovered some four hundred Catholics, mainly Germans, with a scattering of Irish, French, and Scotch. There was a small school attached to the church at Williamsville, but the teacher was a drunkard. The children spoke a language all their own - a horrible mixture of broken English and bad German. Eventually, Neumann dismissed the inept pedagogue and took over the task of teaching himself. But first he established a Mass schedule in all four settlements that kept him trudging up and down the countryside hearing confessions, preaching, instructing the children, visiting the sick, baptizing, officiating at marriages and burials.

In his letters, Neumann describes the difficulties of the terrain, and the labor of making his way through the woods and forests at first on foot, then on horseback. He comments on the extreme cold in the winter, and the intense heat of the summer. He paints a vivid picture of the almost impossible task involved in stripping the forests and wresting a living in this wild land where many of the settlers lived on the verge of destitution. He was intrigued by the booming sound of Niagara Falls he could hear on calm evenings and early in the morning. What bothered him particularly were the swarms of mosquitoes, an insect apparently unknown in his native Bohemia.

The one hobby Neumann indulged was his penchant for botany. He was forever discovering new plants and flowers, describing the flora of the countryside, and sending back specimens to Budweis. For a short while, in his youthful enthusiasm, he hoped his discoveries might make an impression on the scientific circles of his native land.

In the Spring of 1837, Neumann suddenly changed his residence from Williamsville to North Bush. Gossip - spread by a trustee jealous of Neumann's residence in the Wirtz household - hinted that a tavern with a young servant girl was not the proper home for a young priest. Ignoring the calumny, Neumann accepted the hospitality of the Schmidt family in North Bush where eventually the parish built him his own log cabin for a rectory. With the move, he received free room and board, whereas he had had to pay for both while living at the tavern in Williamsville.

Neumann's first assignment in America was St. John's in North Bush, NY, and other log chapels in the Niagara area.

Shortly after the change, Bishop Dubois made a visitation of the vast parish. The aged prelate bounded gingerly over the forest roads, expressing his delight at the obvious success Neumann had achieved in his missionary endeavors, and at the joyful receptions tendered him. The depression of 1837 was in full swing. Money was extremely scarce; yet the people turned out in droves, overwhelming their bishop and pastor with festivals and gifts.

Originally, Neumann's attraction to America had been stimulated by stories of the Indian missions. Saddled with a pioneer parish for German immigrants, he had little contact with the native tribes. Nevertheless, he wrote benefactors in Europe suggesting that missionaries who were going to the Indians should spend some time on the Niagara mission in preparation for their new field of endeavor. Nothing came of this project; but it indicated his mind-set in an attempt to crack the problem caused by the paucity of priests on the American scene.

Neumann did succeed in bringing his younger brother, Wenzel, to help him in 1839. With his invitation, he sent explicit instructions for the journey across Europe to Le Havre. He insisted that he select an American packet boat for the ocean voyage, and deposited money in New York for his convenience on the way to Buffalo. Wenzel brought him his first direct news of home, the family, and his friends in Prachatitz and Budweis. Wenzel then took over the household chores in the log cabin, catechetical instructions, and eventually the task of local schoolmaster.

Neumann's missions prospered. He opened new stations at Lancaster, Tonawanda, Hamburg, Ebenezer, Chictowaga, Plum Bottom, Snyder, and Stormvill. He visited Buffalo at intervals, usually to go to confession and to discuss his inner life with Father Pax. Then, in 1840, around Easter, he fell sick and did not become well for over three months.

Inwardly, Neumann was bothered. Despite the fact that he was obviously a success as a parish priest on the frontier, he was continually chiding himself over his imperfect response to God's graces. While he said his prayers regularly, recited the divine office with attention, celebrated Mass devoutly, instructed children, corrected sinners, and dispensed the sacraments, he felt himself full of imperfections and sins.

In consultation with Father Pax, and occasionally with the Redemptorist, Father Prost, in Rochester, Neumann concluded that he needed constant spiritual guidance. He felt he had a vocation to the life of a monk or in a religious order. In October, 1840, he decided to join the Redemptorists. Without awaiting word from Monsignor John Hughes who had replaced Dubois as Bishop of New York, he set out for Pittsburgh where Father Francis Tschenhens was waiting to induct him into the Redemptorist novitiate.