Early Life and Education
Muench was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Joseph Muench and Theresa Kraus on February 18, 1889, the first of seven surviving children. His father's ancestors were from Sankt Kathrina, along the Bavarian–Austrian border. His father, a baker, emigrated to Milwaukee at age 18 in 1882. His mother was born in Kemnath in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria and emigrated to Milwaukee in 1882 at age 14; Muench's parents married in 1888.
The family lived on the north side of Milwaukee among other German Catholic immigrants, his parents speaking only German in the home. Muench began his training for the priesthood at age 14, entering Saint Francis Seminary in 1904. He was ordained on June 8, 1916 in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and assigned to Saint Michael's parish.
He left Milwaukee in 1917 to become the assistant chaplain of Saint Paul's University Chapel at the University of Wisconsin (now University of Wisconsin–Madison), where he obtained a masters in economics in 1918.
In 1919 Muench entered the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, earning a doctorate magna cum laude in July 1921 in the social sciences, focusing on theological disciplines of economics, social morality, and social ethics. He was a member of K.D.St.V. Teutonia Fribourg (Switzerland), a Catholic student fraternity that is part of the Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen.
The archbishop of Milwaukee granted Muench permission to remain in Europe to study at University of Louvain (Belgium), Cambridge, Oxford, the London School of Economics, the Collège de France, and the Sorbonne. Muench returned to St. Francis Seminary in 1922 as a professor. In 1929, he ceased his teaching duties to become a rector. Muench was promoted to the rank of monsignor in September 1934.
Read more about this topic: Aloisius Joseph Muench
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I began quite early in life to sense the thrill a girl attains in supplying money to a man.”
—Anita Loos (1894–1981)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)