Disappointment

Wimmer Wednesday. Boniface Wimmer arrives in America:

“After a good ocean voyage, Father Boniface and his companions had arrived safely in New York on September 16. There he visited with the Redemptorist Father Rumpler on Third Street, the aged Vicar General Raffeiner in Williamsburg, and the Benedictine pioneer, Father Balleis in Newark. These gentlemen knew the land and the people, and therefore, he could hope to receive good advice from them.

“‘If you want to hear words of wisdom, you must ask gray-haired men.’

“But, how disappointed he was! What kind of advice was he given! They all declared unanimously: to found a monastery with such people—that would never work. He might as well give up his plans now. With a few awkward students and a bunch of poor tradesmen and farmers, one could never establish a monastery or a seminary in America; that was a quixotic undertaking! He should not get involved with Father Lemke; all he was looking for was someone to buy his land. They advised him, therefore, to dismiss the brothers; he himself should take over a German parish, and the students he might try to place in some diocesan seminary.”

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