By Jonathan Singerton

“Over the duration of its existence between 1829 and 1917, the Society donated around 4.2 million Austrian Gulden to the American cause. Unlike other missionary societies, the Leopoldine Society restricted its alms to causes solely for use in North America, meaning the United States and Dominion of Canada.“

Early nineteenth-century America was racked by internal social unrest over the influx of migration. In the United States, several instances of barbarity broke out in cities like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington D.C. where violent mobs demonstrated against the rights of Catholic immigrants who came predominantly from Ireland and the German-speaking lands of central Europe. A steady stream of these migrants contributed heavily to overall rise in the number of Catholics in the United States that reached around 330,000 in 1830. Ten years later, in 1840, that number doubled and doubled again by 1845 to reach nearly 1.5 million Catholics out of a total population of 20 million Americans. The Roman Catholic Church matured concurrently and by 1845, counted among its flock twenty-six bishops, over seven hundred priests and as many churches.[1]

The Austrian Empire (later Austria-Hungary after 1867) played a not insignificant role in defining the course of Roman Catholic development in the United States during this period of expansion and tension. Responding to the calls of American bishops who sought out material and financial aid as well as personnel for the burgeoning dioceses, Church leaders in Vienna alongside the imperial family agreed to create a new religious foundation expressly concerned with the welfare of Catholics in the United States. Sanctioned by papal authority on 30 January 1829, the Leopoldine Society (die Leopoldinenstiftung) aimed at gathering alms for the betterment of American dioceses and to supply an initial stream of parish clergy to administer particularly to the German-speaking immigrants who, reportedly, often went unattended by an Irish-dominated hierarchy. Named for the patron saint of Vienna, St. Leopold, and in memory of the Austrian emperor’s recently deceased daughter, the empress of Brazil, Archduchess Leopoldine, the Society reflected the Austrian dedication to worldwide missions that occurred in fits of enthusiasm throughout the nineteenth century.

Over the duration of its existence between 1829 and 1917, the Society donated around 4.2 million Austrian Gulden to the American cause.[2] Unlike other missionary societies, the Leopoldine Society restricted its alms to causes solely for use in North America, meaning the United States and Dominion of Canada.[3] Archduke Rudolph, Cardinal Archbishop of Olomouc/Olmütz became the first protector of the society with the Viennese Prince-Archbishop Count Leopold Maximilian von Firmian functioning as the president of its directory.[4] Successive generations of the House of Austria including the Emperor Francis I, and his successors Ferdinand I and Franz Joseph all took on the mantle of protector and each contributed personally to the finances of the society.

In all, some 419 individuals received funding from the Leopoldine Society, including twenty-two men for the Canadian provinces and at least sixteen women. Hundreds of missionaries arrived in the United States with help from the Leopoldine Society between 1829 and 1914. Scores of these missionaries rose to prominence within the American Church. The first male American saint, John Neumann, counted among them and Bishop Frederick Baraga became famous as the ‘snow shoe priest’ for his missions among the Native Americans of Michigan. In general, Society missionaries played an oversized role in American dioceses. Of the initial six Catholic dioceses established in the Midwest, only one of them did not have a bishop from central Europe. The first three bishops of Sault Ste. Marie were all born in the duchy of Carniola just as Frederick Xavier Katzer (born in Ebensee am Traunsee) became the bishop of Green Bay and then archbishop of Milwaukee.[5]

On a local level too, these priests effected great change. In Milwaukee, St. Francis de Sales Seminary rose to become one of the most prestigious and prolific institutions thanks to the guidance of its first rectors, Michael Heiss and Joseph Salzmann who both came to Wisconsin as Leopoldine beneficiaries. In addition, Society recipients established dozens of schools as adjacent instructions to churches under their administration. Father Joseph Kundek, based in the town of Jasper, Indiana, established a local Catholic school there as well as in Ferdinand, Indiana—a township he founded in his words “in honour of His Majesty, our most gracious Emperor of Austria, the eminent benefactor and protector of our missions.”[6] The St. Ursula Convent in St. Louis began thanks the original founders Magdalena Stehlin and Maria Josephine Breiding who received travel costs, passports, and initial funds from the Leopoldine Society. Outside the Midwest, Society members were active along the East coast from New York to Savannah, Georgia. In Baltimore, a visiting Austrian canon from St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna laid the cornerstone of St. Alphonsus Cathedral, which itself was not only inspired by the designs of the Stefansdom in Vienna but $12,000 worth of donations from Austria also went towards its construction.[7]

One of the most notable of spheres of influence arising from the Leopoldine Society was its presence among the Indigenous people of North America. Over the course of the nineteenth century, priests from the Habsburg lands came to affect the lives of the Akimel O’odham (Pima), Diné (Navajo), Hocąk (Ho-Cunk/Winnebago), Kalapuya, Mamaceqtaw (Menominee), Molala, Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Odaawaa (Odawa/Ottawa), Shoshone, Tillamook, Tohono Oʼodham (Papago), Tututni, and Yo’eme (Yaqui) peoples. Native Americans in North America featured prominently and consistently within the Leopoldine Society’s activities. Of the 10,000 Austrian Gulden awarded to individuals between 1831 and 1841, over one third of this sum went to six missionaries active among indigenous populations, and half of the funds during the first five years were spent on these Indigenous missions.[8] Funding for Indigenous missions continued throughout the duration of the Leopoldine Society; in 1913, three missions active in Arizona and Oregon received some of the final funds transferred from Vienna before the outbreak of war.

Society beneficiaries followed a complicated relationship with Native Americans. On the one hand, they could sometimes act as promoters and defenders of Indigenous culture. Stalwart proponents such as Anselm Weber, who laboured at the Franciscan St. Michael’s Mission from 1989 until 1921, pleaded against the “impractical and fatal” results of allotment on behalf of the Diné (Navajo).[9] Similarly, the Vorarlberger Johann Jutz who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the infamous massacre of 270 Mnikowoju Lakota men, women, and children by the U.S. army at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, argued for peace between peoples: “Indians cannot be governed or converted by guns and bayonets,” he concluded years later, “but they can be won over by love and friendliness.”[10]

At the same time, the Austrian influence within Catholic matters did not go unnoticed by American contemporaries. Although criticism emanated from various quarters from disgruntled clergy, Irish interest groups, and federal agents on reservations, the loudest denouncements came from Protestants who feared an irreversible Austrian-orchestrated complot against the foundational principles of the American republic itself. Samuel F. B. Morse led the charge of this conspiratorial banditry despite his overwhelmingly positive reputation today as the inventor of the telegraph and his eponymous system of code. As the scion of an ardent Protestant New England dynasty, Morse inherited a natural despondency towards vilifying Catholics, but Morse reserved a particular ire for the Austrian Empire. Morse launched a blistering attacks on Austrian involvement in American religious life through op-eds in New York serials. “The St. Leopold Foundation,” he contended, “is asserted to be a political combination of foreign powers, founded with a view to the overthrow of our republican government.” Austria, so Morse’s thinking went, so intolerant of the Protestant republic in the New World had assembled “immoral nunnery systems” and “slave-making seminaries” so that they could eventually force Americans to “worship, love and obey, as their lord and master, some scion of the House of Hapsburg—the Emperor of the United States!”[11]

However hyperbolic Morse’s claims about the Leopoldine Society may appear to us nowadays, his rhetoric, obsession, and imagined intentions of Austria’s mission in the United States somewhat reflected the widespread prominence achieved by its religious foundation. When compared to the actual influence obtained by its members and beneficiaries, it cannot be denied that the Leopoldine Society effected a certain level of importance in American society. Moreover, it is a significance that is still reflected in the United States today as local parishes still remember their original founders from the Austria(-Hungary), as Catholics still recall the lineage of indebtedness to European financial assistance from such organizations like the Leopoldine Society, and as debates concerning migration and foreign interference still persist as a hallmark of political discussion today.

Further reading

See the special issue of the Journal of Austrian-American History sponsored by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies and published by Penn State University Press that will feature a special issue focused on the Leopoldine Society with essays by Patrick Hayes, Carlo Krieger, Pat McCloskey, Rudolf Svoboda, Katharina Ziegler, and myself.

View Special Issue of the Journal of Austrian American History

Author biography

Dr. Jonathan Singerton is Assistant Professor of Global Political History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. His research interests focus primarily on the transatlantic and worldwide connections of Habsburg history. As a former BIAAS grantee, he is the author of The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy (2022). He is currently editing a volume on the global history of the Habsburg monarchy and working on the Leopoldine Society’s impact in North America.

Since 2024, Dr. Jonathan Singerton has also served as a member of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies Board of Advisors.

His full activities can be found via his personal website: https://jonathansingerton.com/

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References

[1] Robert F. Hueston, The Catholic Press and Nativism, 1840–1860 (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1976), 34-37 and 131.

[2] Gertrude Kummer, Die Leopoldinen-Stiftung (1829-1914): Der älteste österreichische Missionsverein (Vienna: Wiener Dom Verlag, 1966), 17-18; Theodore Roemer, Ten Decades of Alms (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1942), 29-30. For exact numbers, see Jonathan Singerton, “A Spiritual Lacuna: The Austrian Leopoldine Society and the United States of America,” Journal of Austrian-American History 8/2 (September 2024), 73-97: here 75-76.

[3] The Canadian aspect is left out here, as is the later expansion of the Society’s mission to Albania and Belgium.

[4] Roemer, Ten Decades, 40-41.

[5] Sault Sainte Marie and Marquette: Frederic Baraga, Ignatius Mrak, and John Vertin. Katzer had come to the United States with funding from the Leopoldine Society following the missionary Joseph Buh who recruited Katzer as one of fifteen students to come with him to the Great Lakes region, see Steven M. Avella, In the Richness of the Earth: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee 1843-1958 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2002), 188.

[6] Dunstan McAndrews, ‘Father Joseph Kundek, 1810-1857: A Missionary Priest of the Diocese of Vincennes’, MA Thesis (Chicago, IL: DePaul University, 1936), 22-23.

[7] Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840-1856 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 225.

[8] They were Frederick Baraga, 900fl (1831, 1837); Simon Sänderl, 500fl (1831); Franz Xavier Hätscher, 500fl (1831); Andreas Viszoczky, 500fl (1832); Franz Pierz, 400fl (1835); Otto Skolla, 400fl (1841). All of them among the Anishinaabeg.

[9] Anselm Weber, The Navajo Indians: A Statement of Facts (St. Michaels, AZ: Self-published, 1914), 18.

[10] John Jutz, “Historic Data on the Causes of Dissatisfaction among the Sioux Indians in 1890,” Woodstock Letters 47 (1918), 323.

[11] Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States: The Numbers of Brutus, Originally Published in the New York Observer (New York: Leavitt & Lord, 1835), 19, 23, 63