Fr. Ferdinand Wolf (1834-1914)

Father Ferdinand Wolf passed away March 8, 1914.

Father Ferdinand Wolf was the brother of Abbot Innocent, the first Abbot of our community.  At 80 years of age Father Ferdinand was the oldest member of the community when he died.  He was born in Germany and came to Wisconsin with his parents in 1851, enrolling in St. Vincent College, Latrobe, Pa., and entering the order in 1858, being ordained December 22, 1860.  He did parish work in Pennsylvania and then was sent to Kansas in 1878 where he cared for Catholics all along the Santa Fe Railroad from Great Bend to Windhorst. 

He was at Seneca 1882, and from 1883-1886 he ministered to Catholics in Marak, Everest, Reserve, and later built the church at Hiawatha.  It was during this time that the normally timid Father Ferdinand made a statement against the temperance movement in Kansas.  As purported in Father Peter Beckman’s Kansas Monks, when Father Ferdinand heard that the temperance people in Hiawatha intended “‘to catch the Catholics selling beer at their Picnic near Everest on the 4th of July and to make an example of them for breaking the law,’ he let it be known that he would bring a couple of kegs of beer to treat his friends and that the men of the parish would do the same.”

From 1886 to 1889 he lived at Bendena and then became chaplain to the Sisters at Mount St. Scholastica Convent.  In 1893 he became Chaplain to the Benedictine Sisters, Ridgley, Md., where he died.  Father Bede Durham of the Abbey who was working in Elizabeth, N.J., accompanied the body to Atchison for the funeral was held at St. Benedict’s Abbey Church, March 16 at 9:00 am.