Bregenz
A lifelong Love of Home
Vorarlberg is an ancient cultural landscape. It has been settled since times immemorial. The Rhetians came before the Celts. The Romans, too, left their imprint. Bregenz (Brigantium) received its town charter from Emperor Claudius. The Christian religion entered the region on the heels of Roman imperial troops and colonists. Later, much later, with Emperor Constantine’s rise to power and the erection of the diocese of Chur (now Switzerland), Christians felt emboldened to come into the open. Chur was separated from the north Italian archdiocese of Milan and incorporated into the Frankish imperial church. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Vienna appeared on the map, and Vorarlberg was affiliated by imperial decree, not to Salzburg of greater Austria, but to the Diocese of Brixen in Tyrol.
Vorarlbergers are said to be warm hearted people who love their homeland and the religion of their ancestors, the Catholic religion. At the same time, they are known to be demanding, strict, intransigent and quick to defend themselves when their freedom and rights are contested.
Francis Wendelin Pfanner’s ancestors came from the Alemannic (Swabian) Allgau. He explained the family name “Pfanner” as deriving from “panner”, pan-maker. The family owned a farmstead, Langen-Hub, one of several others on the border with Germany. It was approximately a three-mile walk from the parochial village of Langen and not far from Bregenz, the capital of Vorarlberg.
According to the parish register, Wendelin’s father, Anton Pfanner, was born in 1794 and on 25 October 1822 married the twenty-two-yearold “virtuous maid”, Anna Maria Fink of Weissenhub. They had three sons and two daughters. Johann und his twin-brother Wendelin were born on 20 September 1825 and baptized on the same day at Langen. Godfather to red-haired Wendelin was his paternal uncle, Wendelin Pfanner, then a student of Theology, and his godmother, Magdalena Fink, a maternal aunt. His mother died of childbed fever at the age of twenty-six after giving birth to her fifth child, a girl, who also died!
For six years, the father’s sister Catherine took care of the Pfanner children. Wendelin and his siblings called her “Godle”, dialect for godmother. She was capable and by Abbot Francis’ testimony, a “strict foster mother: industrious, economical, responsible, devout and orderly”. She did not spare the “birch” or rod. Wendelin did not particularly like her cooking, but in his later years he fondly remembered her meatless dishes, usually fry-ups: spaetzle and noodles, fatless cheese and sauerkraut.
The Founder’s Memoirs give a glimpse of the family’s faith life.
“The unwritten law was: No day without morning prayer and no main meal without grace. Grace after the midday meal was followed by a string of prayers: several Our Father’s for a happy death and prayers to St. Martin and St. Wendelin, to guard the house against malice and accident; prayers for parents, relatives and the Holy Souls in Purgatory, and finally the Angelus. After the last grace at supper we all said an Our Father for the Holy Souls, a prayer for a good night, an act of contrition and a few ejaculatory prayers. All prayers were led by my father and joined by the farmhands.”
The house in Langen-Hub, Vorarlberg, where Pfanner was born
At the age of seven, the twins started their primary education in a oneroomed school house in Langen-Hub, where a teacher, who also functioned as organist and sacristan, taught Religion and Arithmetic. German (Grammar) was not a subject, “because people thought that it was enough for peasant children to know how to read and write”.
Wendelin was only eight years old when he had to get up at five every morning to help his parents in the stables, as was the custom in rural areas. The Pfanner children also had to give a hand with cutting and sawing logs, cultivating the soil, making hey, binding sheaves, harvesting potatoes, and erecting fences.
On Low Sunday 1833, the twins were allowed to make their first Holy Communion. They were confirmed on 19 June of the same year, either in the parochial church of Bregenz or at Feldkirch. A year and a half later, on 21 October 1834, Wendelin’s father married again. His second wife was Maria Anna Hoerburger (*1808) from Sulzberg in Bregenzer Wald. She gave birth to three sons and four daughters, of whom three died soon after birth.
One early morning when the sun was just up, Wendel was to drive a two-horse wagonload of sand to the mill. He failed miserably, as the wagon overturned and the sand was spilled. His father, watching him closely, ran up and snarled: “You will never be a farmer! I give you just one more chance: Try your luck in the saw mill! If you fail again, you will study!”
Studying in Feldkirch and Innsbruck
Abbot Francis relates that very early on Michaelmas Day (29 September 1838) his father came into the bedroom which he shared with his twin brother and shouted for him to get up!
“Wendelin! You must go to Feldkirch to study!” – I was awake immediately. On this morning, I put on a new student’s coat instead of my short jacket and exchanged my coarsely sewn and heavily cleated boots with a fine pair of thin leather shoes made for town. Thus duly apparelled, someone completed my outfit by shoving a fire red umbrella under my arm. When my father dipped his fingers into the Holy Water font by the door I did the same, but I remember that I did not know why my stepmother was crying and telling me to be good. – Once we reached the highway, my father pulled out his beads and on this beautiful morning we said a whole Psalter (15 decades) in turns. Later, we boarded a nice horse drawn omnibus which brought us to Feldkirch, City of the Muses … When my father left to return home, the only thing he said to me was: ‘Pray always and study hard’!”
Wendelin was soon known all over Feldkirch on account of his red hair. His record in the 1838/39 school registry is evidence of a good head: “Wendelin Pfanner – Conduct: Excellent; Social Studies, Religious Knowledge, Latin, Geography and History: Very Good; Arithmetic: satisfactory.” Because his first lodging was rather primitive, his godfather, now a parish priest, hired better quarters for him “at the house of two elderly ladies”. He attended daily Mass at the Capuchins’. However, after two and a half years he and a friend took up quarters with a lady and her two daughters who also boarded other students. With them he undertook hikes and weekend excursions. One evening, he found the front door at his landlady’s already locked. How could he get to his room without waking her? He quickly found a way: Making a desperate attempt to climb the leaning wall at the back of the house, he reached the open window of his room, jumped in and landed with not too much of a thud on the floor – only to find the landlady already standing in the door, shaking her head at him and saying but one word: “So, that’s how it’s done, eh?” He wished the floor had opened under his feet. Unable to utter a single word, he vowed to himself never to get into any more misconduct.
Later, a school friend remembered: “Wendelin and I had a room at Rev. Professor Wegeler’s. But after seeing under what circumstances the snuffing lady cook in the kitchen prepared our favourite dishes, we decided to leave the place as soon as the year was over.”
Wendelin spent his vacations at home, giving a hand with the work in the farm, woods, fields and sawmill. It was good exercise for him and a lot of fun besides teaching him many useful skills, as he gratefully remembered in later years.
At the end of September 1844, he and some of his classmates transferred to the Gymnasium in Innsbruck, the capital of Tyrol. The way there led across the Bavarian Allgau by way of Staufen, Immenstadt and Sonthofen (“Where my father bought our excellent Allgau bulls”) to Reutte in the Lech Valley. It was a journey which the Founder vividly remembered in 1901, when he was seventy-six years old:
“All my travels from Bregenz to Innsbruck and back were across mountains and hunchbacked hills … I remember that once on a late afternoon we got caught in a dense fog and suddenly found ourselves on the edge of a cliff over which a swift brook cascaded downward. The fog had lifted just enough for us to see the horrible depth to which this brook plunged. To add to our predicament, we had a classmate with us who was shortsighted and terribly frightened. Seeing the poor fellow quaking in his boots, I said to him: ‘If you care to entrust yourself to me, I will