by Roz Young
The little group of monks at Nazareth was poor, hungry and cold most of the time. Their diet was of the poorest kind. All they had to flavor their soup was salt. Their clothes became so thin and ragged that some of the Catholics in Dayton gave them garments from their own closets to wear.
In order to earn a little money, the brothers sold wood, vegetables and apples at the market. They harvested 300 bushels of barley and almost the same amount of apples, and their potato crop was enough for their own use but not enough to sell any.
Father Leo Meyer found himself in political hot water at every turn. The archbishop at one time told him he bothered about things that were none of his business. Meyer wrote to the archbishop Nov. 15, 1850: "How have I lost your good will? Let me know what has caused the rift between us, so that I may make reparation."
Archbishop John Purcell may have felt that Meyer's proposal about a seminary was meddling. Meyer suggested that the archbishop should lease five acres for the seminary, renewable every three years. The working brothers living in the farmhouse would develop the land. The archbishop would "fit up the house, except the clothes and linen of the personnel of the house."
Meyer and the archbishop would agree on a charge for board and room for each person the archbishop admitted to the house, whether a professor, student or domestic.
There was much friction between Father Meyer and Father Henry Juncker of Emmanuel parish. Purcell had told Meyer when he left Cincinnati that he should busy himself only in the community and in no activity in the parish. Then Father Juncker told Meyer that Father Joseph Stephan would come to Emmanuel while he (Juncker) accompanied the archbishop on a tour of the churches in the diocese. Meyer assisted Stephan while he was there. When Juncker returned, Stephan returned to Cincinnati. Meyer learned that the Germans in Dayton were thinking of building a new church, and the archbishop had sent Stephan to direct the work.
Meyer offered to assist Juncker after Stephan left, but Juncker said he could manage alone. "You can guess this gave rise to all kinds of rumors," Meyer wrote to the general superior.
"Some people, learning that we had services, came to assist at them. The most we had was six persons for Mass, and that only once; and another time there were 15 persons at Vespers. It appears that all this brought umbrage to Father Juncker and perhaps more so to the bishop. Here is proof of this: Father Juncker announced that I had jurisdiction only over the religious who lived in the house and that I was to send away all persons who would come to assist in the services."
This squabbling was not unobserved by the Catholics in Dayton.
Father Meyer also learned from Brother Stinzi in Cincinnati that the archbishop asked his superiors in France to replace Father Meyer with another priest of the Society. Meyer, knowing that the archbishop was going to Rome and suspecting that on his return he would stop at the Society headquarters, wrote to one of the fathers there. "Stay in the vague with the archbishop, settle nothing, be courteous, extend compliments, tell him all the nice things I wrote you about him, complain of nothing and do not say that I have reason for complaint," he wrote. "You need have no fear; he cannot make any reproaches against me founded on fact, even if an investigation were made."
Three young Americans entered the Society in 1851. Soon after they joined, improvements were made in the original Stuart house. The men made an extra room out of the long porch by enclosing it with windows and siding. They dug a cellar under the north side of the building to serve for a kitchen and refectory. They also built an addition to the barn.
Brother Schultz, who had been the cook, began to have doubts about his membership in the Society. (Father Meyer wrote to Europe that he had expected to be made a priest and was disappointed when he was not.) He left in April 1851 and became a Jesuit.
After he left, Father Meyer added beekeeping to his other duties.
More troubles developed soon. Meyer had scraped together enough money for the March 1851 payment of interest to John Stuart and left the money in his desk drawer. After the midnight Christmas Mass, when he opened his desk drawer, the money had been stolen. He had to borrow $150 to meet the payment. The entire income from students and boarders of Nazareth was only $1,200 a year, and it looked as if the September payment could not be met. Besides they needed to buy lumber to make repairs on the threshing floor of the barn.
And then came a devastating blow in a letter from Father Caillet in Europe to Archbishop Purcell.
Roz Young is a columnist, author, historian and lifelong Dayton-area resident. Address: Dayton Daily News, P.O. Box 1287, Dayton, Ohio 45402. Phone messages can be left at 225-2289.