PATRIARCH OF PANNA MARIA
The name of Father Leopold Bonaventure Maria Moczygemba of the Friars Minor Conventual sounds almost like a small detachment from the cavalcade of saints. It fittingly belongs to a man who strides into American history, like Moses the Rescuer, at the head of a throng of several hundred Polish immigrants, "who sought shelter from poverty and oppression - and wanted no more than freedom and a piece of bread."

Both these commodities were not easy to come by in Upper Silesia, where Leopold Moczygemba was born October 28, 1824 in the little but high-sounding village of Wielka Pluznica. The Prussian ravagers who had seized these Polish lands during the partitions of the eighteenth century not only renamed the village Gross Pluschnitz but also made the lives of the Polish folk "a burden with drudgery."

Not much is known of Leopold Moczygemba's early years in his native Silesia, except that his parents, Leopold and Eve nee Krawiec, were honest hardworking farm folk and that he received his elementary schooling in the town of Gliwice. But from the age of nineteen, when Leopold became a Franciscan friar, his life is illumined by and made a part of the Franciscan chronicle.

From various inscriptions in this chronicle, we gain some notion of Leopold Moczygemba's progress during the nine years which followed his reception of the Franciscan habit at Osimo, Italy, on November 17, 1843. As Father Bonaventure Maria he was affiliated to the Convent of S. Vittoria delle Frate where, after a year's novitiate, he made his profession on November 18. After his profession at Osimo in 1844, Frater Bonaventure Maria began a peripatetic course of studies for the priesthood which took him first to Ascoli-Piceno, then to Recanati in October 1846. The same year, however, he was transferred to the Franciscan College at Urbino.

In this ancient Italian town, Frater Bonaventure Maria Moczygemba, O.F.M. Conv., received the subdiaconate on December 14, 1846 and the diaconate on March 10, 1847. Four months later, on July 25, 1847, he was ordained a priest at Pesaro. He was then three months short of twenty-three years of age. This fact perhaps explains why within eight months after his ordination, on July 25, 1848, young Father Leopold Bonaventure Maria (he continued using his baptismal name after his ordination) was sent by the Franciscan Minister General Magni to Wuerzburg, Bavaria, for further studies.

During Father Leopold's four-year stay in the Bavarian Palatinate, where the German Conventual Franciscans had a motherhouse at Oggersheim, a significant thing happened. An American bishop, the first ordinary of the recently-erected diocese of Galveston in Texas, Bishop J. M. Odin, visited Oggersheim early in 1852 in search of priests for his diocese which included a growing number of immigrant German Catholics. Among the five Conventual Franciscan friars who accepted this mission call to America was Father Leopold Bonaventure Maria Moczygemba, then not quite twenty-eight years old and only in the fifth year of his priesthood.

This pioneer band of Conventual Franciscan missionaries, which was to establish the foundations of Conventual Franciscanism in the United States, arrived at Texas sometime in April or July 1852. In addition to Father Leopold, it consisted of three other priests - Fathers Bonaventure Keller, superior; Dominic Mesens and Anthony Mueller - and one lay brother, Giles Augustin. From this group later came the great organizers and builders of Conventual Franciscanism in America, the first Commissary General and the first Minister Provincial.

Upon arrival in Galveston, the Franciscan missionaries were at once entrusted with four parishes and twelve missions among German Catholics. The parochial centers were located in the towns of Castroville, Fredericksburg, New Braunsfels and D'Hanis; from these the missionaries visited adjacent German settlements to baptize, assist at marriages, preach and offer the sacrifice of the Mass.

Father Leopold Moczygemba began his Texas missionary work, according to one source, in the parish at New Braunsfels. He also labored among the German settlers of Castroville which was originally entrusted to Father Dominic Mesens. The freedom and growing pioneer prosperity of the German immigrants in this southwest Texas territory struck a hopeful chord in Father Leopold's imagination. He wrote home to his parents and relatives hungering after freedom and land in Prussian Pluznica and told them of the thousands of acres of virgin soil, untouched by farmers' plows, that could be had cheaply in America.

These letters became especially enthusiastic after Father Leopold had discussed the possibility of Polish group settlement with a Texas planter, John Twohig, who owned a considerable portion of land above the junction of San Antonio and Ciholo rivers. Aroused by Father Leopold's enthusiastic praise of the new world of freedom and land, about one hundred Polish families sold their possessions in Silesia and in October 1854 boarded a vessel for the land of promise. After nine weeks, they finally landed at Galveston worn out by the long voyage, but filled with the hope Father Leopold had fired in their hearts. They were the first large group of Polish farmers to come to America - forerunners of the hundreds of thousands that were to follow them in the half-century before the first world war.

In the meantime, an important change had taken place in Father Leopold's missionary career. When ill health compelled Father Bonaventure Keller, the superior of the Franciscan mission band, to withdraw from Texas to the more favorable climate of New York, Father Leopold assumed the leadership of the Franciscan missions. This greatly increased his responsibilities and duties.

Perhaps, too, this was the reason why Father Leopold was not on hand to greet the Polish farmers when they arrived early in December at Galveston. From a descendant of these Polish pioneer builders of America in Texas, we learn something of the plight of these people who ventured into a new land of which they knew little and expected only land and freedom.

"At this time, and for the next two years, the yellow fever wrought its ravages along the Gulf Coast. It had no mercy on the new arrivals at Galveston. Here a few, stricken with the plague, had to remain; others, because of the hardships of the sea and the sudden change of climate, lacked the strength to proceed. The city had its attractions for a few youth, ambitious and adventurous. The rest, hiring Mexican carts, on which they piled their belongings, such as a few feather-beds, crude farm implements and a cross from their parish church (the church bell was brought with the immigration of 1858), walked until they reached Indianola, two weeks later."

From Indianola, the Polish wagon train swung into the ancient Mexican Cart Road, along which Spanish conquistadores and padres as well as American frontiersmen and desperados had traveled northwest to old San Antonio. There they hoped to find Father Leopold Moczygemba who, like Moses of old, had brought them out of the land of Prussian oppression and was to lead them to a country that flowed with the milk and honey of land and freedom.

As the Polish wagon train slowly made its way on the Mexican Cart Road to San Antonio, first yellow fever then a Texas norther struck down some of the marchers. Wayside births as well as funerals held up the march, which was slowly beginning to shatter the bright dreams with which the Polish farmers had landed at Galveston. Some were forced to drop out and stay behind to join the German communities in Victoria and Yorktown. Most, however, pushed on bravely and hopefully.

The Polish farmers from Silesia seemed an odd motley band to the Anglo-Saxon eyes that viewed their colorful caravan as it finally drew into San Antonio. L. B. Russell, who as a boy witnessed the arrival of the Polish wagon train, gives the following description of it in his memoirs:

"The arrival of the colony was one of the most picturesque scenes of my boyhood ... Simple frontier people like ourselves have never seen anything like the crowd which passed along the road that day. There were some eight or nine hundred of them. They wore the costumes of the old country. Many of the women had what, at that time, was regarded as very short skirts, two or three inches above the ankle. Some had on wooden shoes and, almost without exception, all wore broad-brimmed, low-crowned black felt hats, nothing like the hats that were worn in Texas. They also wore blue jackets of heavy woolen cloth, falling just below the waist and gathered into folds at the back with a band of the same material."

The news of the arrival of the caravan at San Antonio somehow soon reached Father Leopold at Castroville twenty-five miles away. At once he galloped to his waiting compatriots to take charge and to lead them to their final destination at the junction of San Antonio and Cibolo rivers which he had already designated as Panna Maria (Virgin Mary). According to an early Polish American chronicle, Father Bonaventure "could not forget the beautiful church of the Virgin Mary in Krakow, Poland. While having a mission on the Cibolo, some fifty miles from the present Panna

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