The English historian Thomas Carlyle said that “history is the essence of innumerable biographies.” The saying aptly explains why I appreciate a monograph recently sent to me about the life of Edward Vattmann, a missionary priest and immigrant whose life reads like a mosaic of American Catholic history.
Born in what was then known as Prussia, Vattman came to America in 1864 to enter a seminary in Milwaukee preparing priests to work with German immigrants in the U.S. He was ordained a priest in the Diocese of St. Louis, Missouri, whose bishop had been involved in the recruitment of German priests to care for the large and Catholic immigrant population from the various German-speaking countries.
In Catholic author James K. Hanna’s short new biography of Vattman, “For God and Country: The Remarkable Life of Edward Vattmann, Priest and Patriot” (Pittsburgh: Serif Press, 2024), we meet a priest who was a player not only in American Catholic history, but general American history, too.
Vattmann’s presence in the U.S. was due to an initiative to help the waves of new German immigrants, part of an often-overlooked chapter of this country’s Catholic history. The connection he had with Republican politicians in his own Ohio parish provides a window into how party politics reflected some anti-Catholic sentiment at the end of the 19th century: When he was nominated to become a chaplain in the U.S. Army, Catholics made up the biggest Christian denomination in its ranks. Yet of 30 post chaplains there was only one priest after the Civil War.
Vattmann was nominated in 1880 but could only become an Army chaplain in 1890, when he was sent to South Dakota in the wake of the moral catastrophe of Wounded Knee and the murder of Lakota chief Sitting Bull. By all accounts, his work with both the soldiers and the Sioux was outstanding, and he managed to recruit many Sioux to join the Army.
From there, he was pulled into other theaters of American history. During the Pullman Labor Strike of 1894, he was asked to address striking rail workers — many of whom were German — and helped avert a riot that would have ended bloodily. When Vattmann’s friend from his Ohio days, William McKinley, won the presidential election in 1896, it was Vattmann who’d helped deliver him the Catholic vote. (Those were different times, when the archbishop of Minnesota, the great John Ireland, publicly endorsed the Republican candidate.)
When the war with Spain began, it looked like Vattmann would serve in Cuba. Instead, he was sent to a military hospital in Kentucky where wounded soldiers from Cuba were treated and where he served as troubleshooter amid tensions between the Catholic chaplain and the chief surgeon. As usual, he did wonderful ministry, taking pains, for instance, that chaplains of other denominations were called to the deathbeds of Protestant soldiers.
When President McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, Vattmann rushed from his posting in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, to be by his side. Before the president died of his wounds eight days later, the priest cryptically remarked, “They can do what they want with his body; I’ve taken care of his soul.”
Does that mean McKinley became a Catholic while dying? It seems to imply so, and it is noteworthy that Mrs. McKinley insisted that Father Vattmann give the last prayer at the president’s funeral service.
Vice President Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley, sent Vattmann on a special mission to the Philippines, where there was friction between the Spanish friars and the U.S. provisional government. Property disputes (the religious orders had tremendous land holdings which had been disputed by the former Spanish colonial regime) and a schism in the Philippine Church complicated the U.S. protectorate rule in what became a de facto American colony, albeit one with a planned independence.
From Asia, Vattmann sent updates to the White House and the U.S. bishops, and even went to Rome about the situation in the Philippines. Eventually he was dispatched to Puerto Rico, where the American governor complimented Vattmann for mingling “with the people, explaining to them in the most effectual way, the hope and objects of the American government, inspiring among them greater confidence in the Americans and suggesting a method of finally determining any questions that exist between the Church and the government.”
The priest retired as chaplain, with the rank of major, in 1904. President Roosevelt, over the objections of future president William Taft, decided to appoint him to a government superintendency of Filipino students who had received scholarships to study in the United States.
After that work, Vattmann was involved in a program facilitating the settlement of Catholic immigrants in the United States. For that reason there is a town named after him in Texas. In his “retirement” Vattmann ministered in the Catholic parish in Wilmette, Illinois, and died there in 1919.
American Catholics are inclined to score low on indices of what we could call “Catholic identity.” That is why we need Catholic history. Think of the fictional character of an amnesiac who cannot remember who he is: not to know your past is not to know who you are.
Our society, in a constant process of transforming itself (mostly for the worst) gives a nudging priority to “reinventing yourself.” It’s a crisis John Sutherland associated with living in Los Angeles in his book “Last Drink to LA”: “California is, at root, an immigrant culture where your past is so far away geographically as to be lost, dropped off and forgotten like fuel stages on a rocket.
The story of our forefathers and mothers in the faith is more than the parts of the space rocket jettisoned in our future trajectory. Books like Hanna’s biography of Father Vattmann, and the one he wrote about Bishop Bonaventure Broderick are useful antidotes to our penchant for ignoring or forgetting our past. May this slender biography stimulate more scholars studying our history, give more perspective to the laity, and inspire priests to a more heroic and energetic model of ministry. Thank you, Mr. Hanna.
