St. John Neumann

St. John Neumann was born on March 28, 1811, at Prachatitz in Bohemia (now Prachatice, Czech Republic). He completed seminary studies at Budweis and Prague, but with his homeland oversupplied with priests, his ordination was postponed indefinitely. Determined to serve the German-speaking immigrants of the New World, he crossed the Atlantic in 1836 with little more than the clothes he wore, and within weeks was ordained a priest in New York City. His first assignment was the raw frontier around Niagara Falls, where he traveled endlessly on foot and horseback among scattered immigrant farm families. Longing for community, he joined the Redemptorists in 1840 and in 1842 became the first member of the congregation professed in America; he later served as its American superior. Small in stature and plain in manner, he was a tireless confessor and pastor who eventually heard confessions in more than half a dozen languages — even learning Irish Gaelic for his immigrant flock — and he became a naturalized American citizen in 1848. In 1852, against his own wishes, he was named the fourth bishop of Philadelphia, then one of the largest dioceses in the country. In eight years he organized the first unified diocesan Catholic school system in the United States, multiplying parochial schools from a handful to roughly one hundred, founded the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, introduced the Forty Hours devotion to the Eucharist on a diocesan-wide basis, opened parishes at the rate of nearly one a month, and wrote catechisms widely used in American classrooms. He drove himself without rest among immigrants, orphans, and the poor. On January 5, 1860, aged forty-eight, he collapsed and died on a Philadelphia street while running errands for his people. Beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1963, he was canonized by the same pope on June 19, 1977 — the first American bishop, and first male U.S. citizen, to be declared a saint. His feast is kept on January 5, and his remains rest beneath the altar of the National Shrine of St. John Neumann at the church of St. Peter the Apostle in Philadelphia, a busy place of pilgrimage for the schoolchildren, immigrants, and city faithful who count him their own.