Abstract
Founded in Vienna in 1829, the Austrian Leopoldine Society (die Leopoldinenstiftung) contributed greatly to the cause of American Roman Catholicism. The Society reflected the compassion of the clergy in the Austrian Empire to help the perceived plight of Catholics in the United States. Its mission focused originally on the support of Midwestern dioceses but steadily grew to encompass almost every corner of the United States. Over the course of the following nine decades until the outbreak of the First World War, Society supporters raised the substantial sum of over three million Austrian kronen for American dioceses with an additional 286,722 florins given as support for missionaries to travel to the United States. As an introduction to the current special issue focused on the effects and legacies of this important religious element within the Austrian-American relationship, this article serves as a broad overview for the development, scale, and historical importance of this missionary foundation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 73-87 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Journal of Austrian-American History |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 30 Sept 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 Penn State University Press. All rights reserved.
Funding
The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies that enabled the meeting at the University of Innsbruck which formed the occasion for some of these papers in this special issue to be presented and discussed. Starting in the 1830s, a steady stream of religious men and women came to the United States from across the Habsburg lands in order to reinvigorate the Catholic faith among German-speaking immigrants, predominantly those located in the American Midwest. Some individuals received support as part of a direct effort from their home communities. Others applied to the Leopoldine Society\u2019s central administration with the blessing of their superiors for travel funds from the collective pot. In some exceptional cases, relatives of missionaries received stipends such as Antonia H\u00F6ffern (n\u00E9e Baraga).9 It is worth noting here that lay women and women religious applied on a few occasions to the Society. In early 1851, for instance, Aloisia Walz and Anna Leibnitzerin requested funding to realize their \u201Cdeep desire\u201D to go to the United States in order to devote themselves to poor and sick orphans \u201Cout of love.\u201D10 These requests by women mostly went unfulfilled except for a donation toward the rebuilding of the Ursuline convent in St. Louis after a devastating fire\u2014an institution that Austrian and Bavarian nuns had established with some original aid from the foundation\u2019s coffers.11 The vast majority of individual beneficiaries, therefore, were men who either went to serve on missions or were already ministering in an American diocese. In all, some 419 individuals received funding from the Leopoldine Society, including twenty-two men for the Canadian provinces and at least sixteen women.12
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies | |
| Universität Innsbruck | |
| Leopoldine Society |
Keywords
- Catholicism
- diplomacy
- Habsburg studies
- historiography
- missionaries
- nineteenth-century history
- transatlantic