St. John Neumann, Pray for Us!

If you aren't familiar with St. John Neumann, fourth Bishop of Philadelphia, please remedy the situation at once. What a great saint! He himself was an immigrant to the United States where he exhausted himself in service to God's people. A gifted linguist, he was the perfect priest to be sent to America where multiple immigrant people often had no priest who could speak their languages. Neumann, on the contrary, was fluent in six languages including Italian and taught himself Gaelic so he could hear the confessions of the Irish immigrants in the coal-mining region of Pennsylvania who had no English.

St. John began as a diocesan priest, but desired the fellowship of community life and later entered the Redemptorists.