During our procession through our cemetery earlier this month for all souls, we passed the grave of Fr. Franz Schneeweiss. Many of you asked about this priest unknown to us with a curious ordination date, certainly rare for his time, at fifty-years-old. Let’s just call him an honorary parishioner as we remember his remarkable life.

Rev. Franz Maximillian Wilhelm Schneeweiss was born in New Jersey, son of an Austrian immigrant father of the same name. His father was a minor noble who fled the political upheavals in the German-speaking lands during the early 19th century, settled in the United States, and embraced the Dutch Reformed Church, entering its ministry. Franz the younger, however, would go on to become an Anglican rector, spending at least part of his ministry at the Anglo-Catholic church of St. Mark on Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia.

In 1908, to great scandal, eight Episcopal priests, including Schneeweiss, became Catholic as part of an American wave of the Oxford Movement begun by St. John Henry Newman. We are not sure how he came to the Archdiocese of Baltimore, but we may well suppose that rejection by polite society in Philadelphia drove him to make a new start. Fr. Franz attended St. Mary’s Seminary and was ordained by Cardinal Gibbons in 1915 at 50-years old. Assigned ministry among the Black community in Washington, DC, he served at St. Theresa of Avila, the mother church of Washington’s parishes east of the Anacostia. In 1867, following the Civil War, the federal government bought 375 acres “across the river” for a Black settlement called Barry Farms. Though the congregation at St. Theresa was mixed, Blacks were required to addend Mass in the back pews of that church until Fr. Schneeweiss arrived and celebrated regular Mass for the Black congregation in the church basement.

The Black community at Theresa had appealed to Cardinal Gibbons as early as 1911 for the creation of their own parish. The request was granted in 1918. In 1920, after building the new Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church at Ft. Stanton, Fr. Schneeweiss was formally appointed pastor. He loved his people and served there until his death in 1942. Acknowledging his German immigrant roots and the German Catholic burial ground at St. Mary’s Cemetery, with great love his parishioners donated the memorial marker for his grave there where he awaits the eternal reward of his labors.