Archabbot Boniface Wimmer

Archabbot Boniface Wimmer, OSB

While Fr. Nicholas Balleis was nurturing the small German Catholic community in Newark, the great enterprise of establishing the Benedictines in the United States was begun by a monk of the Abbey of St. Michael at Metten in Bavaria, Father Boniface Wimmer. 

Born in 1809, Wimmer was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Regensburg in 1831. He had grown up during a period of great turmoil for the church in Bavaria. Monasteries had been closed, the monks dispersed, and church properties seized, under the influence of Napoleon’s secularization policies.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the reoganization of Europe at the Congress of Vienna, a new King of Bavaria, Ludwig I, however, reversed the anti-clerical policy of his father.  Thus, in 1830, after a hiatus of a quarter century, two aged former Bavarian monks officially reintroduced Benedictine monastic life at the Abbey of St. Michael at Metten.     

Wimmer and several priest friends had already felt drawn to the monastic life and with the permission of their bishops entered the monastery at Metten in 1832. A year later, Wimmer, a very young man two weeks shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, along with five other priest-novices, made his solemn monastic profession. This novice year was to be the only year that Wimmer would spend in a Benedictine monastery before undertaking the monastic formation of numerous followers in the New World.

There was great concern in Bavaria at the time for the German-speaking immigrants to America and their need for German priests to serve their pastoral needs. King Ludwig I had founded the Ludwig Missionsverein to support missionary work in America. Boniface Wimmer, in his turn, began to feel drawn both to respond to the religious needs of his fellow countrymen in America and to the dream of extending Benedictine monasticism to what he believed would be a rich field ready for the harvest in the New World. The story of Wimmer’s stubborn determination against all setbacks to achieve this twin purpose, overcoming the initial opposition of his abbot and community, and of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, is long and fascinating.

Finally, in 1846 Wimmer and a band of eighteen pioneers boarded the packetboat Iowa, in Rotterdam. None but Wimmer had ever spent a day in a monastery. Four of his followers were students for the priesthood and fourteen were candidates for the lay brotherhood. After a difficult voyage of twenty-eight days, on 15 September 1846 at 3:30 PM, Wimmer and his band passed through customs and stepped into a strange new world.

Wimmer was disappointed not to be met in New York by the pioneer priest, Father Peter Henry Lemke, who had offered him land in Pennsylvania. Even more discouraging, several experienced German missionaries whom he did meet, Fathers Raffeiner, Vicar General for Germans in New York, Nicholas Balleis from Newark, and others, all strongly advised Wimmer against attempting to establish a Benedictine monastery in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. They cited the failures of several previous attempts to make permanent foundations by both Trappists and Redemptorists, and they advised Wimmer to seek a position in a diocese and to work independently, as had Fr. Nicholas.

But Fr. Boniface hadn’t triumphed over innumerable obstacles and crossed the wide Atlantic to be so easily deterred. Just as he and his band were about to board a train, they finally encountered Fr. Lemke, with whom they journeyed west to Pennsylvania. After a false start near Carroltown in Cambria County, Fr. Boniface ultimately accepted property offered by Bishop Michael O’Connor of Pittsburgh that would ultimately become St. Vincent Archabbey and the mother of numerous abbeys and thousands of monks in one of the lesser known sagas in the history of the Catholic Church in America.