Early Years and Prussian Military Service
As a boy, Jessing worked in a print shop to provide for his mother and two siblings as his father had died when Jessing was only four years old. The young boy devoted what little spare time he had to reading and study. When he grew to manhood, Jessing did what many young boys did when he enlisted in the Prussian army, an organization known for its severe training regimen and discipline.
In the army, Jessing rose to the rank of quartermaster sergeant, who proved himself a successful fighter as well as logistician. He was decorated by King William I of Prussia for bravery at the Battle of Dybbøl, earning many decorations and medals for his service in the Seventh Westphalian Artillery during both the First and the Second wars with Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Despite all these military achievements, Joseph's dream of ordination remained his true ambition.
In 1867, Jessing left his home in Münster, Westphalia, to pursue his lifelong vocation of the Roman Catholic priesthood. Unbeknownst to Jessing, this was the first step of the many steps he would take toward the founding of an orphanage, a college and a seminary in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Jessing
Famous quotes containing the words early, years, military and/or service:
“Todays pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase early ripe, early rot!”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 23:10,11.
“My ancestors were all famous for military genius.
My Lady smiled graciously. It often runs in families, she remarked: just as a love for pastry does.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (18321898)
“The Service without Hope
Is tenderest, I think
...
There is no Diligence like that
That knows not an Until”
—Emily Dickinson (18311886)