Maximilian Albert

Bishop Maximilian Albert SMA, Vicar Apostolic of the Gold Coast, 1901

Maximilian Albert SMA (born August 17, 1866 in Nuremberg , † December 15, 1903 in Würzburg ) was a Catholic priest from Franconia , a missionary father in what is now Ghana , apostolic prefect from 1895 , and apostolic vicar of the Gold Coast Vicariate from 1901 .

Life

Priest and missionary to Africa

Maximilian Albert was born in 1866 as the son of a lawyer in Nuremberg, in the Kingdom of Bavaria. Because of his father's professional reasons, the boy and his parents moved to Hagenau or Strasbourg , in what was then the German realm of Alsace-Lorraine as a young boy . There he attended the lyceum, eventually entered the order of the Lyon missionaries (also known as the Society of Africa Missions ) and studied in the religious seminary of Clermont-Ferrand .

He was ordained a priest in Lyons on July 14, 1889 and was sent to the mission in the same year. He landed on October 12, 1889 in Elmina on what was then the Gold Coast, in what is now Ghana. His still young order had been active in this area since 1880. Regina Jach writes in her work on Ghanaian churches “Migration, Religion and Space” that sending priests to this area was almost equivalent to a death sentence. The Apostolic See hesitated for a long time before setting up the mission there in an area that was notorious as the “tomb of the white man”. Father Albert first worked at the mission station of his order in Elmina (= Portuguese for "gold mine"), then he founded a branch in Cape Coast , which developed very well. In 1892 Maximilian Albert returned to Europe to recover from the murderous climate, but on January 11, 1893, he went back to his mission.

Apostolic Prefect

In 1896 he was again ordered to return home for the purpose of being appointed Apostolic Prefect . He arrived here on September 6th and on September 12th he was appointed Apostolic Prefect. Outwardly he was equal to a bishop and led the entire mission of the order on the Gold Coast, but had no authority to ordain. From September 1896 Albert worked again in Africa. At that time, only 5 priests had survived a yellow fever epidemic in the entire area . The mission was drained, both financially and personally. The shepherd soon went on a begging trip to France, Germany and Belgium, from where he brought back large donations, new missionaries and nuns. Because of the better infrastructure, he moved his headquarters to Cape Coast, where the state government headquarters had been for a long time. There he built a new mission house and school on Franz de Sales Hill; another school in Saltpond .

Bishop and Vicar Apostolic

When the number of 5,000 baptized was exceeded, Pope Leo XIII. the region to the Apostolic Vicariate , ie to the "diocese on probation", whereby Maximilian Albert was appointed on May 27, 1901 as the first Apostolic Vicar of the Gold Coast and titular bishop of Hadriani ad Olympum . The episcopal ordination took place on July 21 of the same year, in Lyon, by the local archbishop, Cardinal Pierre-Hector Coullié . Bishops Jean-Amand Lamaze , Vicar Apostolic of Central Oceania and Louis-Callixte Lasserre , Vicar Apostolic of Aden acted as co-consecrators .

In November 1901, Monsignor Albert returned to his mission diocese and was enthusiastically received there, as the church history of Ghana reports. The population had seen the elevation of their remote region to a diocese as a clear honor by the Pope. During Albert's pontificate, the upswing in ecclesiastical life that he initiated continued. He founded another branch in Axim and began building the cathedral on Cape Coast, where he had relocated his headquarters, but only a school hall converted into a chapel was available to him as a "bishop's church". In addition, on September 21, 1902, the chief shepherd traveled to the German Steyler missionaries in neighboring Togo to inaugurate their church in Lomé . There is a very colorful report about this in the book History of the Catholic Church in Togo , by Father Karl Müller SVD . Accordingly, Msgr. Albert was picked up by 24 Togolese horsemen with white trousers, black skirts, wide sashes, brightly colored lances and a German flag for presentation in the nearest English border town of Denu. He was carried in a hammock to the beach near Lome, where he was received by a procession sent out and solemnly led into the city. On November 9, 1902, he served as co-consecrator at the episcopal ordination of Joseph Antoine Lang , Vicar Apostolic of Nigeria . Albert fell seriously ill with malaria as early as Christmas 1902 and had to return to Europe for medical treatment in February 1903. In Würzburg, in his Franconian homeland , he died in December of that year as a result of blackwater fever . Regina Jach stated in “Migration, Religion and Space” that there was great mourning for the German shepherd on the Gold Coast. He was succeeded as Apostolic Vicar in 1904 by the Swiss Father Isidor Klaus , who belonged to the same missionary order as Maximilian Albert and who also died after a pontificate of around one and a half years. Only his successor, the Alsatian Franz Ignaz Hummel , was able to shape and consolidate the mission sustainably between 1906 and 1924, in an activity as Apostolic Vicar for almost 20 years. On April 18, 1950, the Vicariate Apostolic Gold Coast received the rank of regular Archdiocese of the Catholic Church and is now called the Archdiocese of Cape Coast .

Works

• "Mission Greetings from the Gold Coast - A Piece of Cultural and Church History from West Africa", Verlag Kreuz und Schwert, 1898

literature

• Obituary with picture: "City of God", Illustrated by the Steyler Missionaries, January 1904.
• Karl Müller SVD: "History of the Catholic Church in Togo", Steyler Missionsbuchhandlung, Kaldenkirchen, 1958
• Regina Jach: "Migration, religion and space - Ghanaian churches in Accra, Kumasi and Hamburg in processes of continuity and cultural change", Lit-Verlag, Münster, 2005, ISBN 3-8258-7003-0
• Pashington Above: Asante Catholicism, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996

Web links

• Entry on catholic-hierarchy.org with partially incorrect data
• On the church history of Ghana, with the mention of Bishop Albert in 1901 ( Memento from November 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive )