American Saint from the Czech Republic

      Visitors (and pilgrims) to the Saint John Neumann Shrine at St. Peter the Apostle Church at 5^th and Girard Streets will find an attractive monastery like setting. Besides the chapel, resplendent in gold, marble and a Byzantine icon of the Virgin Mary in place of a statue, there’s a café that can seat 50, an atrium with piped in Georgian chant, and a gift shop with a rich selection of rosaries and unusual statues of Our Lady of Fatima. Capping the complex is a museum devoted to the life and work of St. John Neumann (1811-1860), born in the Kingdom of Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. Neumann migrated to the United States in 1836 where he became the fourth bishop of Philadelphia (1852-1860).  

The marble stoop where the saint collapsed and died. From a rowhouse at 13th and Vine Streets.

   

   The Neumann museum has attracted the attention of roving urban reporters who would otherwise not report on religious topics. The ‘more-hip-than-thou’      

    RoadsideAmerica.com, for instance, informed its readers that the shrine is where St. John Neumann, “is dressed in a miter and vestments, and resembles a big rifle bullet inside a glass-sided gun barrel.”

   This description, despite its military industrial complex analogy, indicates that the writer was to some degree mesmerized by what he saw. The writer continues:   

“… When Neumann was exhumed in 1962 it was reported that he was remarkably well-preserved for someone who had been buried for over 100 years. His body has nevertheless been given a wax face, to remain presentable.”

    Patrick J. Hayes, Ph.D, Archivist (for the) Redemptorist Archives of the Baltimore Province, guided me on a tour of the museum. Hayes never mentioned bullets, though he did point out the hangman’s noose that was used to hang two brothers at Moyamensing Prison. The story goes that many clergy had failed to convert the two brothers prior to their execution. One clergyman did succeed, however, and that was Bishop Neumann. There’s no record of what Neumann said to the condemned although it probably had something to do with spending eternity in Dante’s Inferno. The hood that was placed over the condemned men’s heads is also prominently displayed, creating a kind of Mutter Museum chill. (The noose and hood were both presented to Neumann sometime after the executions).

The saint's body inside a glass coffin.

   As for Neumann’s “death relic,” RoadsideAmerica.com reported that when Neumann was exhumed in 1962 he looked remarkably well preserved. That’s not quite the case, however.

     “They first brought him up out of the ground in 1902. The coffin he was in was found to be water damaged but the Bishop himself was looking pretty good close to 40 years after his death,” Hayes said, adding that he was redressed and placed in a second coffin and put back in the ground.

   In 1962 the body was exhumed again.  “The coffin was okay but Neumann was looking like he’d been dead for 100 years… in all that time you get a little leathery, kind of mummified,” he said.

    Hayes said he has the photographs of the exhumed 1962 body “in a folder.”

Pre-Vatican II Monstrance. When monstrances did not look like UFO's.  

   In 1962, the decision was made to reconstruct Bishop Neumann’s face forensically. When the old death mask was removed it was put in a vault because it is considered a second class relic by the Catholic Church. 

  In the years before the Second Vatican Council Bishop Neumann’s body was in a glass altar set back in the sanctuary under the tabernacle. After the revolution/wreck-o-vation in church architecture, Neumann was redressed in period vestments under the direction of then Cardinal Rigali and placed in front of the altar so he could be easily seen.

  “The Redemporists” Hayed noted, “decided to get him out of the 1962 apparel then prevalent, which made him look like he was covered in aluminum foil.”  

General museum view. 

   The “little bishop,” just 5’2” tall, loved to walk everywhere.  “But he had a lot of self doubt. He thought of quitting and asked a number of American bishops about the possibility of taking a smaller diocese. He wanted out of the limelight in the worst way,” Hayes said.

    As a student at the University of Prague he was known as the ultimate egghead-intellectual. Hayes recounts how as a seminarian the future Philadelphia bishop could detect the slightest bit of heresy coming from his professors. “This caused many of them to be brought down for their ideas,” Hayes added.  “But it also made him tremendously humorless.” Unlike, say, St. Philip Neri (1515-1595) commonly known as the patron saint of humor.

  But this intellectual who spoke multiple languages (which endeared him to immigrant communities), elicited a lot of laughter when he clumsily mounted a horse, his feet barely reaching the stirrups.    

      The museum contains Neumann’s books, documents, letters, prayer books and papers. A nature lover, his collection of botany books are also on display as well as a copy of the Douay Rheims Bible, printed in 1870 by Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey. According to Hayes, the museum’s copy of the first English language Catholic Bible is the best preserved of the 40 remaining copies worldwide.

     You’ll also find a simple pale wooden altar with a small tabernacle on top where the saint used to say Mass. The paleness of the wood makes it look more like a chest of drawers than an altar. Inside the small tabernacle door, which is not easy to open, is where some leave prayer requests. Nearby is another chest of drawers, albeit of darker wood, where the saint once said Mass for a family named Kelly. A hole that looks as though it had been crudely carved by a knife mars the long counter top. Hayes said that when Neumann was celebrating Mass for the Kelly family one of the candles caught fire and burnt a hole through the wood. The hole now acts as a drop off point for more prayer petitions.

    A large monstrance reminiscent of the one used by actor Jeremy Irons in the film, ‘The Mission,’ casts a golden hue  onto the museum floor, illuminating the bishop’s encased vestments, especially his cope, which he would have used at Benediction.

    

   I asked Hayes if there was ever a problem with people confusing Cardinal Newman with John Neumann.

   “A classic example,” he said, “is the statue of St. John Neumann in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. When the Italian sculptor was finishing the job he had only the label to make, so he turned to a Redemporist and asked how the saint’s last name was spelled. ‘N-e-w-m-a-n-n,’ the Redemporist answered, so Saint John Neumann is mislabeled in Rome.”

    The marble stoop originally at 13^th and Vine Streets where Bishop Neumann collapsed and died stands at the entranceway to the museum. Philadelphia’s Archbishop Chaput stood in front of the stoop when he blessed the museum on April 29, 2019.

   The story of Neumann’s death has become the stuff of legends, but how many know that he had just left the post office to check on the whereabouts of a chalice he had restored for another priest. Thinking he had mailed the restored chalice to the priest some time ago, he was surprised when a Post Office clerk told him it was not mailed but had been placed on a shelf for insufficient postage.

    After paying the additional postage, the little bishop continued on his rounds but collapsed from a stroke in front of a house owned by a Jewish couple who were the first to discover his body.

    A glass stained window in the museum shows an idealized image of the bishop in spotless clerical garb after his fall.

   

     

       

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor