An Imperative
Wimmer Wednesday. Boniface Wimmer continues in a letter to those who would follow him to America.
“What I know about America I have learned only from hearsay or from what I have read about it. I must be prepared to meet all possible emergencies. I am giving up a comfortable and honorable position and cannot reasonably expect another. I am leaving behind relatives who are poor and therefore stand in need to me. I am parting from kind superiors and confreres who honor me and only reluctantly consent that I go. I am renouncing a position in which everything is well ordered to enter upon an entirely new state of life in which everything has to be started anew and be put in order.
“I do this because I feel an inner compulsion and imperative, although I take upon myself difficulties, cares, and hardships. My heaviest burden, however, will be that I must carry out my plans with men whose willingness, confidence, and vocation have first to be tested.”I do this because I feel an inner compulsion and imperative, although I take upon myself difficulties, cares, and hardships. My heaviest burden, however, will be that I must carry out my plans with men whose willingness, confidence, and vocation have first to be tested.
“You see, therefore, that I have no advantage over you. I am willing to take you along because I am confident that you will gladly share my joys and sorrows in the service of God and of our neighbor. If you join me, you must be animated by the same confidence in me. If you cannot have this confidence in my integrity, my honesty, my zeal, my experience, and my determination, do not go with me. Under such conditions you would not obey, and I could not keep you. We must all be animated by a mutual love and confidence in one another. Perhaps next to confidence in God, these qualities will often be the only means to console and support us in our difficulties and hardships. Through harmony small things grow; through dissension great things are destroyed.”
—From Boniface Wimmer, Abbot of Saint Vincent in Pennsylvania, translated by Dr. Maria Von Mickwitz and Father Warren Murrman, O.S.B., editor.
