Religion: The Saint They Almost Overlooked

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He stood but 5 ft. 4 in., so they called him "the little priest." He was a shy sort, not much of an orator, and enough the awkward immigrant from Bohemia that some of his colleagues lobbied in vain with Rome to keep him from becoming the bishop of cultured Philadelphia. When he died at 48, the carvers misspelled his name on the tombstone.

John Nepomucene Neumann,* who on June 19 becomes America's third Roman Catholic saint, was no ecclesiastical superstar, but a priest of simple piety and workaday faithfulness. So much so that Vatican officials who screen candidates for sainthood nearly overlooked him. They shelved his case in 1912 because of serious doubt whether he had displayed the necessary "heroic virtue."

Neumann's advocates persisted, and they finally got a hearing with Pope Benedict XV and a board of Cardinals in 1921. Just a few hours before that meeting, the main opponent of Neumann's canonization collapsed and died in a barber's chair. Benedict subsequently designated Neumann as Venerable (worthy of veneration and a proper recipient of private prayers)—the beginning of the long process to sainthood. In doing so the Pope set a precedent for the future judgment of possible saints by declaring: "Even the most simple works, performed with constant perfection in the midst of inevitable difficulties, spell heroism in any servant of God."

Priest Surplus. This path of humble heroism began when Neumann graduated from seminary in Prague but could not get ordained because there was a surplus of priests. He took a boat to New York City in 1836, hoping to be a missionary even though he had no assurance that there was a job for him. German-speaking priests were in short supply in America, and Neumann was quickly ordained and dispatched as a missionary to farmers around Buffalo. He later ministered in Pittsburgh, Baltimore and many other towns.

In 1842 Neumann became the first man received into the Redemptorist order in the U.S., and only five years later was named head of the nation's Redemptorist missions. After two years he asked to be relieved of the administrative burden, which made him an unlikely candidate to be a bishop. But Neumann's quiet spiritual stamina appealed to Francis Kenrick, who had left Philadelphia to become Archbishop of Baltimore. When Neumann heard that Kenrick was recommending him as his successor in Philadelphia, he beseeched nuns to pray against such an appointment, which he considered "a grave calamity for the church."

Pope Pius IX thought otherwise, and in 1852 Bishop Neumann plunged into the hurly-burly of mid-century church affairs. The debt-ridden church was swelling with poor immigrants, and Neumann was forced to become absorbed in bricks-and-mortar fund raising. He began building churches at the rate of one almost every month, and devoted much care to the completion of the cathedral roof. He was particularly concerned with the building of Catholic schools, for he said openly that public schools were dens of immorality and heresy. When he became bishop, only 500 Philadelphia children went to parochial schools; within three years that number rose to 9,000.