John Stephen Raffeiner

Background

John Stephen Raffeiner was born on December 26, 1785 in Walls in the Austrian Tyrol.

Education

He was educated by the Benedictine Fathers in Innsbruck and in a Roman medical college. In Milan, while in charge of a military hospital, he experienced a religious calling. He studied theology in Rome.

Career

He was ordained a priest in May 1825, and served as assistant and pastor in his native diocese of Brixen. Learning of the dire need of missionary priests among the German emigrants to America, he volunteered for this service with the consent of his ordinary, who supplied his traveling expenses. On his arrival in New York (1833), he was authorized by Bishop John Dubois to visit his compatriots in all parts of the diocese and urge them to establish churches and mission centers.

In 1836, he erected St. Nicholas Church in New York, over which he presided for several years. He became vicar general for the Germans under Bishop Hughes, who relied wholly upon his judgment in handling all matters touching the German groups. He visited the Germans of Boston twice a year, organized parishes in Roxbury (1835) and in Boston.

He assisted in organizing the first German congregations in Rochester, Utica, Inama, and Buffalo, as well as a score of scattered missions throughout New York and New Jersey which became thriving parishes. Though beloved of his own people and honored by Hughes, Raffeiner as a German was not advanced to the see of Brooklyn on its creation in 1853 but continued as a vicar general of that diocese under Bishop John Loughlin and as the father and apostle of the Germans of the archdiocese until his death.

Achievements

• He was instrumental in building St. John's Church in New York, Holy Trinity in Williamsburg on Long Island, St. John's Church in Newark, and a church at Macopin, New Jersey.

Personality

A spiritual man, ready as a preacher in German, French, and Italian, tactful in settling racial differences and the problems of trusteeism, Raffeiner was everywhere.