The Salesianum is an ecclesiastical seminary near Milwaukee which enjoys a very high reputation for the learning of its professors, the solidity of its course of studies, and the strictness of its discipline. Near it there is a Normal College for the training of school-teachers, and another college for the intermediate education of boys. The man who was the principal founder of these excellent institutions was the Very Rev. Joseph Salzmann, D.D., an Austrian priest, who came to Wisconsin as a missionary thirty years ago and finished his earthly course in January, 1874, honored and regretted throughout the United States. The venerable Archbishop of Milwaukee first conceived the idea of founding a seminary to educate priests for the Northwest more than thirty years ago, while praying at the tomb of St. Francis de Sales, and this is the reason of the name Salesianum by which the seminary was christened. The first rector was the present learned Bishop of La Crosse, Dr. Heiss. Dr. Salzmann succeeded him in office in 1868. The Rev. Professor Rainer, in the little volume before us, gives an interesting account of the whole life of Dr. Salzmann, but especially of his great and arduous work of founding and establishing the Salesianum, which we may truly call a heroic achievement. He was a thoroughly learned and accomplished scholar, a man of sacerdotal dignity and personal attractiveness, an eloquent preacher, with fair and seductive prospects before him in his own beautiful Catholic land. He was well fitted to adorn those positions in the church which are surrounded with the most outward éclat, and give the opportunity of enjoying all the ease, comfort, and pleasure in literary pursuits and quiet seclusion which are lawful and honorable in the priesthood. Nevertheless, he chose the life of a Western missionary, and devoted the greater part of his time and energies, not to the intellectual and attractive employments of preaching and instruction in the sciences, but to that most repugnant and arduous work of collecting money and looking after the drudgery of building, providing, caring for the material wants of new, poor, struggling institutions. It is not possible for any who have not been brought up in some one of the old Catholic countries of Europe to estimate the sacrifice made by young men of refined character and education, and strong love of home and country, when they devote themselves to missionary labor in a new country, and to its hardest, most repulsive departments. There are special difficulties and hardships to be encountered by those who work among our German population. When they are bad or indifferent Catholics, they are the most obstinate and unmanageable people with whom a priest can have to deal, and very difficult to reclaim. Apostate and infidel Germans have a brutality in their hatred to the Catholic Church and all religion which is extremely odious and cannot be fully appreciated by one who has not come into personal contact with that class, whose only god is beer and whose church is the lager-beer saloon. Zur Hölle is the appropriate motto we have seen over one of these dens in New York. When thoroughly imbued with the Catholic spirit, the German people are admirable. The wonderful work of Christian civilization wrought out among them in past ages is known to all readers of true history. Dr. Salzmann, and others like him, are worthy successors of the apostolic men whose names are recorded in the history of the church. They are the men who carry on the true Cultur-Kampf in the vast realms of our Western territory. Their acts are worthy to be classed with those so charmingly related in The Monks of the West and Christian Schools and Scholars. A keen Western speculator said that “a bishop was worth as much as a railroad to a Western town.” All that is wanted to repeat in the immense regions of our new States and Territories the creation and development of great civilized and Christian communities is the virile force, the manhood, of those early times. Land and material resources exist in prodigal abundance. It is men that are wanted—masses of people with strength and spirit to abandon our crowded cities and old States and colonize new domains, and men with the ability and virtue of leaders, guides, founders, instructors, legislators, rulers, and benefactors. We trust that the modest recital of the life of one generous young priest who left his charming Austrian home to engage in this work may find its way among the educated young men and young ecclesiastics of Germany. There is work here for some among the hundreds of such young men, full of vigorous health, full of intellectual vigor, full of sound learning, who are at a loss to find a sufficient sphere for their activity in their own country.
The greatest and noblest project of Dr. Salzmann was one which he could not even begin to carry into execution—that of founding a university, a new Fulda, for the Germans of America. We do not think that such an institution could or should remain permanently an exclusively German university. We desire, nevertheless, to see this grand idea carried out, as a special work of our Catholics of German origin and language, under the direction of a corps of learned German professors, and with special reference to the education of youth who are of the same descent or who wish to study the language and literature of Germany. Time and the course of nature will eventually blend all our heterogeneous elements together, but we do not believe in violent efforts to hurry on the process. All that we can borrow from any European language or literature, all the recruits we can gain from the nurseries of scholars or population in the Old World, is so much added to our intellectual, social, and political strength and breadth. Of course the English language and literature, American history and institutions, ought to be assiduously studied by the learned foreigners who are domesticated among us, and taught to their pupils of a different mother-tongue. This may be done without abdicating the advantage which they possess, and which others must acquire at the cost of great labor, by being born heirs to the inheritance of their own immediate ancestors.
The great practical question of the moment is that of Catholic education. The advocates of compulsory secular education are the enemies of religion, of their country, and of true culture. The seminaries, colleges, and schools where Catholic priests, youths, and children are trained in sound religious knowledge, morality, and science are the fortresses and the centres of real civilization. Whoever does a great work in the cause of Catholic education is a benefactor to the church and the country. Such a noble and meritorious man was Dr. Salzmann, a priest powerful in word and work, a model for the young ecclesiastics of the Salesianum to imitate, an encouraging example for all who are laboring to found and perfect similar institutions. The diocese of Milwaukee was a poor and feeble little bishopric when the venerable Dr. Henni was consecrated in 1844. Now it is a metropolitan see, with above 190,000 Catholics in its diocesan limits, above 180 priests, several flourishing institutions for the higher education of both sexes, and schools in almost every parish. The Salesianum, where the first rector, Dr. Heiss, was professor of Greek, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and moral theology, numbers thirteen professors and two hundred and fifty students. Surely, the prayers and labors of a good bishop, seconded by those of able and zealous priests, can work wonders now as well as in the best ages of the past. Indeed, works which a St. Francis of Sales was unable to accomplish are now successfully performed within a short time and with comparatively little difficulty. Assuredly, we cannot fail to recognize a special benediction of God upon the church of the United States.
The Consolation of the Devout Soul. By the Very Rev. Joseph Frassinetti, Prior of Santa Sabina, in Genoa. Translated by Georgiana Lady Chatterton. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)
The worth of a book ought to be estimated chiefly from its intrinsic merits, yet, even without being acquainted with these, we may often obtain a fair idea of its character by knowing something about the author.
Father Frassinetti was an extraordinary man. He was born in the city of Genoa on Dec. 15, 1803, and died there on the 3d of January, 1868. Thirty-nine years of his life were spent in the priesthood, with an unsullied reputation for piety and zeal, and a wide-spread fame as a preacher, director of consciences, and writer on spiritual matters. A uniform edition of his works, which are all in Italian, was published shortly before his death in ten volumes, and dedicated to the late Cardinal Patrizi, Vicar of Rome.
The first volume of his collected works contains Il conforto dell’ Anima Divota, of which we have the excellent translation before us. Its author was not only a remarkably learned man, but also a singularly pious man—one whom our Holy Father Pope Pius IX. called, in a certain brief, a priest spectatæ doctrinæ et virtutis—and distinguished by the rare faculty of being able to communicate his knowledge to others, and of knowing how to lead others on to personal holiness. Nearly forty years of his life were passed in leaching his fellow-men by word and example how to love, serve, and honor God and save their souls. That such a one should have written this little book on The Consolation of the Devout Soul is a sufficient guarantee of its usefulness and doctrine. The work is divided into five chapters and an appendix, in which the author successively defines what is meant by Christian perfection, shows that it is not a thing too difficult to be acquired, solves certain objections against facility of sanctification, explains the beauty and utility of Christian perfection, points out the means of arriving at this much-desired end, and concludes with a short treatise on the holy fear of God. Several notes are added.
This translation bears the imprimatur of the devout and learned Bishop of Birmingham. We earnestly recommend it to the members of religious orders, and to people who serve God in the world.
The Code Poetical Reader, for school and home use. With marginal notes, and biographical notices of authors. By a Teacher. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)
This Reader is made up of eighty short poems from British and American authors. Each selection is accompanied by marginal notes and is headed by a short biographical notice. The plan is excellent, the publishers’ work is well done, but the biographical notices are so brief as to be of little value, and the marginal notes are nothing more than commonplace definitions of difficult words. Perhaps it is hardly just to call the words referred to difficult, since the majority of the poems are as simple in diction as Lord Ullin’s Daughter. The fault may be attributed partly to the marginal-note plan, since an absence of notes would leave an unsightly page. Still, this is no excuse for careless definitions: unfriended is a poor substitute for forlorn; California is not a mountainous country of North America on the Pacific coast; Indian is a name given to the aboriginal inhabitants of America, not to the ancient inhabitants; pollution does not mean to corrupt; concealing can hardly mean at once hiding and to keep secret. In the lines from The Village Blacksmith,