Joseph Jessing - Early Years and Prussian Military Service

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:

    All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.
    June Jordan (b. 1939)

    So cruel prison how could betide, alas,
    As proud Windsor, Where I in lust and joy
    With a king’s son my childish years did pass
    In greater feast than Priam’s sons of Troy?
    Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour;
    Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)

    There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Let the good service of well-deservers be never rewarded with loss. Let their thanks be such as may encourage more strivers for the like.
    Elizabeth I (1533–1603)