INTRODUCTION

It was in 1948, while searching through documents concerning the Baltimore Province in the Roman archives of the Redemptorists, that I first became aware of the considerable amount of historical and personal material referring to John Nepomucene Neumann, C.SS.R., a Redemptorist parish priest, missionary, and bishop of Philadelphia (1852-1860). I had been commissioned to photograph pertinent documents for Father Michael Curley, C.SS.R., then assiduously working on an official biography of the Little Bishop, whose heroicity of virtues had been affirmed by a decree of the Holy See.

I soon realized that I was not competent to photograph the documents and began to take them surreptitiously to a commercial photographer. I paid for the copies with the stipends I was making as a free lance correspondent for Catholic and other newspapers. Had I been caught taking the precious documents out of the house, I suppose, I would have been excommunicated. No such calamity ensued. Eventually, I returned to the States and became an assiduous devotee of Saint John Neumann.

A second printing of this biography of Saint John Neumann seems called for by the obvious fact that the first printing is exhausted. And then also, and more especially, because of the great number of people seeking his intercession in their spiritual needs, as well as by the increasing frequency of daily pilgrimages to his shrine on Fifth and Girard Streets in Philadelphia.

In the course of preparations to bury him in his cathedral's crypt, the Redemptorist superior, Father John De Dycker, asked if he might not be buried in the Redemptorist church of Saint Peter in keeping with a wish Neumann had often expressed. On his arrival in Philadelphia, Archbishop Francis P. Kenrick, Neumann's patron and the metropolitan of the province, authorized that arrangement with the remark: "The Little Bishop would be home at last, finding a resting place in death where he could not find it in life."

Francis Xavier Murphy, C.SS.R.

Introduction Chapter I Niagara Missions Chapter IV Baltimore Chapter VII Vine Street & Eternity	Preface Chapter II Prachatitz Chapter V Philadelphia Epilogue	Prologue Chapter III Pittsburgh & Baltimore Chapter VI Rome, Vienna, Prachatitz