PREFACE

My first awareness of John Nepomucene Neumann came as a boy studying for the priesthood at the Redemptorist seminary in North East, Pennsylvania. He was then known as the Venerable Bishop Neumann and we were told we should pray that one day soon he would be beatified. It never crossed my mind, of course, that I would occupy a post he once held as Redemptorist superior in the Baltimore Province. Nor did I envision that I might be responsible for some of the arrangements involved in his canonization.

As recounted here in Father Francis X. Murphy's brief biography, Neumann's life was sufficiently momentous to have satisfied the ambition of a man of his day and age interested in adventure. In his own unobtrusive but determined fashion, he combined an old world culture and spiritual awareness with the courage of a pioneer - a trait not often stressed by his earlier biographers.

His experiences on the American missions were in no way tame; nor were the phases of his varied career without mishap and minor triumphs. For the consolation of our upset generation, there was hardly anything regular or even peaceful in his odyssey to ordination, his parish work, Redemptorist novitiate, responsibilities as religious priest and superior, and above all in his activities as fourth bishop of Philadelphia.

What strikes me about the man, however, was his equanimity or the self-possession with which he faced his tasks despite a certain interior turmoil of soul. What stands out clearly in his letters and the record of his activities was the fact that he did know his own mind, and acted in accord with his duty as he saw it. This, in my opinion, is the key to his sanctity.

In his Journal or the diary of his soul that he kept as a seminarian and young priest, he reveals a structured type of spiritual consciousness. He suffered in the attempt to purify his motives and live up perfectly to his concept of the Will of God. His road to growth in sanctity was not traveled by all saints. But he grew to sanctity in a life lived in circumstances of enormous change. This fact gives him special meaning for us today. He took life and change in stride without dramatic leaps. In so many ways he was an ordinary man, priest and religious of his time.

This fact was brought out clearly by Pope Benedict XV when in 1921, he declared that Bishop Neumann had practiced heroic virtue by doing the tasks of daily life and of his office with great exactness out of the love of God. The Holy Father indicated that as seminarian, parish priest, Redemptorist and bishop, John Neumann worked unselfishly at loving his neighbor as himself. And his self-love was bound up with his love of Christ.

Even though he was reckoned a saintly man, there would probably be surprise manifested by his fellow Redemptorists, his contemporaries as bishop, and, of course, by himself at his selection for canonization by God and the Church. But that is one of the great mysteries of the Church as the People of God. One never knows to whom the Holy Spirit will advance that extra modicum of grace that separates the saint from the merely saved. What Neumann's canonization is saying to all of us is simply this: "Be prepared; be open to the grace of God, it might be you."

Joseph L. Kerins, C.SS. R. Former Provincial, Baltimore Province