Cahensly, Peter Paul b. October 28, 1838; Limburg an der Lahn, Hesse d. December 25, 1923; Koblenz, Prussia

Founder of the St. Raphaels-Verein zum Schutz der katholischen deutschen Aus- wanderer (St. Raphael Association for the Protection of German Catholic Emi­grants), which he served as general secre­tary and later as president.

Peter Paul Cahensly was a central fig­ure in the “nationality question” within the American Catholic Church. He served in the Abgeordnetenhaus (Prussian House of Delegates) from 1885 to 1915 and in the Reichstag (German parliament) from 1898 to 1903.

After completing his merchant appren­ticeship, Cahensly traveled to the French port city of Le Havre, where he lived from 1861 until 1868. While in Le Havre he witnessed the hardships that emigrants faced. Inspired by the actions of a German missionary priest, P. Lambert Rethmann, whom he met while working for the St. Vincent de Paul Society, Cahensly decided to lobby for the improvement of emigrant conditions in Europe’s port cities. During the annual Katholikentage (Catholic Days), he called upon the General Assembly of German Catholic Societies to take an ac­tive role in providing spiritual, moral, and material help for emigrants in the promi­nent ports Antwerp, Le Havre, Bremen, and Hamburg. His efforts led to the for­mation of the St. Raphaelsverein at the General Assembly in Mainz in September 1871.

Cahensly provided the new association with financial support and served as its first general secretary (and later as its president from 1899 until 1919). He met with emi­gration authorities and government offi­cials in the port cities and drafted annual reports on the enforcement of emigration regulations. In 1883 he traveled incognito to the United States in steerage so that he could gain firsthand experience of the mis­erable emigrant conditions. While in the United States, Cahensly toured the “Ger­man Triangle” of the Midwest and the large cities of the East Coast, drumming up sup­port for emigrants along the way.

During the 1880s and 1890s, Ca- hensly’s name became synonymous with a particular view in a debate within the American Catholic community. Cahensly believed that German Catholics were los­ing the faith in the United States because the American church did not adequately cater to the needs of its national minori­ties. German Catholics, he argued, needed German priests who spoke German with their congregation. Thus he helped draft and then presented Pope Leo XIII with the Lucerne Memorial (1891), which recom­mended that the American church be dis­tricted upon national rather than geo­graphical lines and that bishops should be selected in proportion to the size of the re­spective national immigrant communities. Pope Leo XIII eventually rejected the Lucerne Memorial, but his decision did not prevent bickering within the American Catholic Church. “Americanist” Cath­olics, who were predominantly liberal and Irish, denounced what they called “Ca- henslyism” as an affront to the catholicity of the church and an encroachment of German Catholic politics onto American soil. Cahensly did in fact represent the German Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) in both the Prussian House of Delegates and would later become a member of the German parliament. He denied that his stance on the national question in the American church was politically motivated and maintained that he had only the spir­itual interests of German Catholics in mind. The St. Raphaelsverein (after 1977, Raphaels-Werk) continues to aid emigrants to this day.

Kevin Ostoyich

See also St. Raphael’s Association for the Protection of German Catholic Emigrants

References and Further Reading

Barry, Coleman, J., OSB. The Catholic Church and German Americans. Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1953.

Gleason, Philip. The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

Roemer, Theodore, OFM Cap. The Catholic Church in the United States. St. Louis: B. Herder, 1950.

Schenk, Heinrich, and Victor Mohr. Das Erbe Cahenslys: Festvortrag zum 150. Geburtstag Peter Paul Cahenslys. Hildesheim: Bernward Verlag, 1989.