Boniface Wimmer: Abbot of Saint Vincent in Pennsylvania by Father Oswald Moosmüller, O.S.B. (review)

352 ABR 71:3 – September 2020 of Avila wanted every convent of her reform to have a copy of the book. St. Ignatius read it at the time of his conversion. St. Francis de Sales recommended the work to St. Jeanne de Chantal. As a window into the fourteenth-century, a summary of earlier works on the gospels, and as an object of lectio divina, this is a fascinating, if somewhat expensive, set of books. Hugh Feiss, O.S.B. Monastery of the Ascension, Jerome, ID 700. Boniface Wimmer: Abbot of Saint Vincent in Pennsylvania by Father Oswald Moosmüller, O.S.B. Translation by Dr. Maria von Mickwitz and Fr. Warren Murrman, O.S.B. (Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Publications, 2019. Pp. xv, 216. $21.00. ISBN 978-1-0925-0675-5). The privileged place ofArchabbot Boniface Wimmer inAmerican Benedictine history has been a given for some time. It is a deserved position, buttressed by the scholarly works in our own time of Jerome Oetgen and the laudable efforts of St. VincentArchabbey to publish the letters of Wimmer. Now we are blessed with a worthy translation of the first effort at recording the life of Wimmer. It is a biography written in 1891, four years after Wimmer's death, by Father Oswald Moosmüller, a monk who in many ways was the individual at St. Vincent whom Wimmer found to be most indispensable for implementing his vision of the spread of the Benedictine Order in North America. Moosmüller remains a fascinating figure in his own right as a member of the founding generation. In the course of his time as a monk under Abbot Boniface, he helped to found monasteries in Kentucky, Ontario, Kansas, Georgia and Alabama. He was the first rector of the House of Studies in Rome established by Wimmer in the 1860s. He was singularly responsible for saving the community of St. Benedict's in Atchison in its early years from bankruptcy and closure and he served the American Cassinese Congregation faithfully as its procurator general. He spearheaded efforts to establish a school for African American youth on Skidaway Island near Savannah, Georgia. He refused to accept election as the first abbot of Maryhelp Abbey in North Carolina, preferring to work in the American South with those most in need, and after Wimmer's death he founded a contemplative community of monks in Southern Illinois. BOOK Review 353 Moosmüller authored the first history of the monastery of St. Vincent in 1873 and one finds in the translation of his 1891 biography of Wimmer some of the same strengths of that work. He makes abundant use of primary sources and gives us a rare first-hand glimpse both of the personality of Wimmer and the key players in the history of St. Vincent and its foundations. Particularly revealing are many of the personal sketches he writes on the early years of Wimmer's life in Germany. While much of the interpretive perspective of Moosmüller has been affirmed and enlarged by Jerome Oetgen's work, there are some distinctive accents recounted in Fr. Oswald's biography that deserve mention. He alludes to the "active love of neighbor" that was constantly at work in Wimmer's field of action. Whether it was the welcome of "tramps" at the gate of Wimmer's monasteries or the preferential option he gave to those who were most in need, it became part of the fabric of lived poverty of the pioneer generation, one that was emulated by Moosmüller. Especially revealing are the extended sections of this history that provide eyewitness details of important events in Wimmer's long life. They include the abbatial election of 1858 and the abbot's sixteenmonth stay in Rome in 1865-66. Moosmüller was a keen observer of these events and his compilation of primary sources and personal analysis served as pathfinding models for later historians such as Felix Fellner and Jerome Oetgen. Readership is served well by the translation of Dr. Mickwitz and Fr.Warren.The footnotes added by Fr.Warren provide a more thorough supplement to the text. Apart from some rare errata (e.g., it was Pope Pius IX, not...

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