Arrival and ordination The passengers came within sight of land on May 28, 1836, which was the eve of
Trinity Sunday. The ship remained outside New York Harbor for another three days waiting for bad weather to abate and for some sick people aboard to recover lest quarantine officials require the captain to transport them back to Europe. Neumann, anxious to get ashore, was refused permission to disembark by the captain six times before he was finally let off in a rowboat on which he went to
Staten Island. Several hours later, he took the small steamer
Hercules to lower
Manhattan. An hour before noon on the feast of
Corpus Christi, Neumann stepped ashore with one tattered suit of clothes and one dollar in his pocket. The diocese at that time was home to 200,000 Catholics whose numbers were rapidly being swelled by immigrants, for whom sufficient churches and priests were lacking. The diocese had thirty-three churches and several oratories, while fifty private homes served as temporary places of worship for lack of more suitable buildings. The diocese had thirty-six priests, of whom thirty-one were
Irish and only three German, and needed at least fifteen priests more. Dubois, who Räss had informed that Neumann and his friends Adalbert Schmidt and John Savel all wanted to go to the American missions, was disappointed when only one man arrived. Still, his German parishes were growing quickly, and one was better than nothing. The Catholic hierarchy had been established in the United States only five decades earlier with the appointment of
John Carroll as
prefect-apostolic and then
Bishop of Baltimore, and until 1908, all of the United States was still regarded in the Catholic Church as
mission territory under the jurisdiction of the
Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (or Propaganda). There were no
parishes in the strict sense, and in his own writings, Neumann always observed correct technical usage in referring to a portion of a
diocese as a "mission," "congregation," or "quasi-parish." However, places where he worked are often described by more recent writers as parishes. After his ordination, Dubois assigned Neumann to assist Alexander Pax in serving recent German immigrants in the
Buffalo area. The more senior priest there, John Nicholas Mertz, was in Europe raising funds. Neumann departed on a
Hudson River liner with new clothes given to him by Raffeiner and the bishop's funds for his travel expenses on June 28. Dubois wished Neumann to stop at
Rochester before continuing to Buffalo. The German Catholics in Rochester were then holding services in the basement of St. Patrick's Church under the direction of
Bernard O'Reilly. Still, as most of the Catholics in that area were Irish, they raised funds to build a separate church where they could be served in their native language. The German Catholics in Rochester were delighted by a German-speaking priest's arrival, and some planned to write to Bishop Dubois asking him to assign Neumann there permanently. Neumann began to teach the children, whom he found sadly neglected and unable to speak either German or English correctly and celebrate the sacraments. After administering his first baptism, he wrote in his journal, "If the child I baptized today dies in the grace of this sacrament, then my journey to America has been repaid a million times, even though I do nothing for the rest of my life." On the evening of Neumann's first Sunday in Rochester, he was relieved by the German
Redemptorist Joseph Prost's arrival. The encounter with Prost first excited a desire in him to join the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer himself, although it was then only a passing thought. Neumann continued on to Buffalo on July 11. The missions in Buffalo were headquartered at a small church established by Mertz in 1829 known as the Church of the Lamb of God. There were four unfinished churches in the surrounding area at North Bush (the present-day parish of St. John the Baptist, now part of
Tonawanda) eight miles to the north, at
Williamsville eight miles to the northeast (now the parish of Ss. Peter and Paul), at
Cayuga Creek, and thirty miles to the south at
Eden. Pax was so grateful to have another priest to assist him in caring for the extensive territory that he offered Neumann any share of the work he desired, whether he preferred to work in the city where many of the faithful were concentrated or in the rural areas where Catholics were more dispersed. Neumann chose to station himself at Williamsville, from which he cared for an area of some twelve to fifteen miles around it where four hundred Catholic families lived, of whom three hundred were German. Because no pastoral residence had been constructed, Neumann took a room in the home of a wealthy benefactor of the mission, Jacob Philip Wirtz. The partially built church at Williamsville had been founded on land that had been donated to the Catholics on the condition that they would build a stone church, 115 feet long, thirty feet high, and twenty feet wide, a stipulation that was difficult to fulfill because the Catholics in the area were largely poor immigrants who were capable of giving little to the church. Mertz had been able to collect or borrow enough money, stone, and volunteer labor to erect four walls, but that was as far as construction had progressed. While Neumann said Mass for the first time in the roofless structure, some non-Catholics from the area threw stones into the church, one of which landed on the altar. Neumann completed this structure, inducing Wirtz to remit a loan he had made of $400 on the condition that a memorial Mass be said for him every year after his death. A little school was conducted in a neighboring house by a lay teacher appointed by Mertz. Still, Neumann, finding the man's conduct unsatisfactory, dismissed him and took up the task of teaching himself, two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, until securing the services of another teacher seven months later. Neumann was a gifted teacher, and his students fondly remembered his stories in catechism class years later. He would often reward good students with small gifts, and when teaching the children to sing in the liturgy, he would induce those who complained of sore throats to return to singing with
rock candy, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. Neumann again had a school after moving his headquarters to North Bush in 1837 and was erecting a third schoolhouse at
Lancaster by December 1839. Frequent consultations with his confessor, Pax, followed, and after a long time, Pax advised Neumann that it was his vocation to become a
religious. On September 4, 1840, Neumann wrote to Prost, the Redemptorists' superior in America, asking for admission to the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. Receiving a favorable reply from Prost on September 16, Neumann immediately wrote to Bishop
John Hughes, acquainting him with his desire to enter the Redemptorists and asking him to send one or more priests to take over the churches outside Buffalo. Unbeknownst to Neumann, the bishop was on visitation, so no reply was forthcoming. Still, leaving the negotiations with Hughes in Pax and Prost's hands as they advised, Neumann left the Buffalo area on October 8 or 9, 1840. When Hughes learned of the matter, he was not at all inclined to allow a pastor of Neumann's caliber to depart from his diocese, but Prost later wrote, "I appealed to canon law and pointed out that I could not refuse to accept him, even if I wished to. The Most Reverend Bishop was obliged to yield." His brother, Wenzel, stayed to gather up the few belongings that Neumann possessed in the various mission stations and resolved to follow his brother and become a lay brother of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer.
Redemptorist novitiate The Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, popularly known as the
Redemptorists, had been founded in
Naples in 1732 by
Alphonsus Liguori, and had grown only slowly during its founder's lifetime.
Clement Hofbauer established the Congregation north of the Alps.
Joseph Passerat, who ran the Congregation from 1820 to 1848, dispatched the first Redemptorist missionaries to America in 1832. They had secured their first foundation in
Pittsburgh in April 1839, taking over
St. Philomena's Church. When Neumann joined them, they had four foundations: St. Philomena's in Pittsburgh, St. John's in
Baltimore, St. Joseph's in Rochester, and St. Alphonsus' in
Norwalk, Ohio. Neumann arrived in Pittsburgh and presented himself to the Redemptorists on the morning of Sunday, October 18, 1840, where he was invited on the first day to sing the High Mass and preach, which he did despite the fatigue of his long journey from Buffalo. The matter of dimissorial letters having been straightened out with Bishop Hughes, Prost hurried to Pittsburgh to invest Neumann with the Redemptorist habit. As this was the first investiture of a Redemptorist in the
New World, the Fathers wished to make it a solemn occasion. Unfortunately, they lacked the ritual of the prescribed ceremonies and prayers, as their only copies of these had been destroyed in a fire in New York. Drawing on their memories of their investitures, they devised a suitable ceremony and proceeded to clothe him in the Redemptorist habit. He was
naturalized as a United States citizen in Baltimore on February 10, 1848. He served as the pastor of St. Augustine Church in
Elkridge, Maryland, from 1849 to 1851.
Redemptorist superior After six years of difficult but fruitful work in Maryland, Neumann became the
Provincial Superior for the United States. He also served as parish priest at
St. Alphonsus Church in Baltimore. ==Bishop of Philadelphia==