A Mission

Wimmer Wednesday. The impetus for Boniface Wimmer’s missionary work.

“Dr. Salzbacher, Chancellor at the Cathedral of Vienna and board member of the Leopoldine Foundation, whose purpose is the support of foreign missions, undertook a tour through North America in the year 1842. After his return, he published the observations he had made about the conditions of the Catholic Germans in the United States. In his report, which appeared in print in Vienna in 1845, he expressed the wish, on page 349, that Benedictines would also establish a settlement in North America. It was repeatedly pointed out in the mission annals, as well as in several journals, that at the present time the emigration from Germany to America was taking on ever greater dimensions, and that the lack of German priests was becoming ever more noticeable.

“These reports had attracted the full attention of Father Boniface. With growing desire, he sought to acquaint himself with all new reports from the mission countries. Whatever about this topic he caught sight of, he read with intense interest, until a serious inclination toward the mission life was stirred in his lively mind. While Father Boniface now found himself in this state of mind, in his spare time he already started to make plans in his thoughts about mission work, though for the time being, he considered these only as castles in the air.”

—From Boniface Wimmer, Abbot of Saint Vincent in Pennsylvania, translated by Dr. Maria Von Mickwitz and Father Warren Murrman, O.S.B., editor.