He Was a Priest

Among my earliest childhood memories is walking from my grandmother’s farmhouse, across a country road, to an old cemetery on Wisconsin summer afternoons. We would go first to my grandfather’s grave and water the flowers there. Then we would walk through the cemetery, and, as we passed the headstones, Grandma would tell stories about one ancestor after another, until we finally arrived at a stone monument that stands next to the nineteenth-century church. The monument is dedicated to my great-great-great-grandfather, Lawrence Link. It commemorates the donation of a piece of his farmland to the first bishop of Milwaukee in 1851, which allowed a Catholic church, Saint Bruno, to be built there on the Wisconsin frontier.

Decades later, I learned that Lawrence’s brother also has a monument dedicated to him. This one is thousands of miles away, in Michaelskirche in the small Bavarian town of Neustadt am Main. Nearby is Lawrence’s brother’s gravestone, whose large letters read:

GEORG LINK
ER WAR EIN PRIESTER

Er war ein Priester. “He was a priest.” This laconic inscription at once captures the essence and conceals the uniqueness of a man who has also been described as “highly spiritual,” “a rebellious pastor,” “an industrious historian,” “a conscientious curate,” “a deep thinker,” and, most to the point, ein Original im Priesterrock (“an original in priestly garb”).

Born in the Lower Franconian village of Eichenbühl in 1815, Georg Link was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Würzburg in 1840. After a stint as parochial vicar in Pflochsbach, he became pastor in Neustadt am Main in 1848. He served there until his death fifty-three years later. Link left an indelible impression on the Catholics of the Spessart region. In 1978, a Neustadt street was renamed in his honor: Die Pfarrer-Link-Straße. A historical exhibit about him ran in 2011. A subject of perennial interest in local newspapers, Link’s deeds have passed into legend: how he lived like a monk in the ruins of an ancient monastery; how he once staged his own mock-funeral; how he cared for the sick and the poor; and, above all, how he was nearly suspended from the priesthood for refusing to shave his beard.

The story of Fr. Link in Neustadt begins with his installation as pastor, which he recounted in Edenic terms:

A small boat adorned with spring flowers and May verdure carried me downstream on the gentle waves of the Main River to the shores of my new field of work. There the parishioners had gathered to greet their newly arrived shepherd in the usual way, leading him solemnly into the festively decorated space of the old abbey church. This ancient house of God still breathed the spirit of the more than thousand-year history of the once so-fertile seedbed of Christianity. This spirit then filled my heart and held it captive with iron bracings.

Link’s parish church was the former Neustadt am Main Abbey, which dated back to the eighth century. When Saint Boniface established the Diocese of Würzburg, he sent the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk Saint Burchard to be its first bishop. Before Burchard took up his ministry in Würzburg, he and his companions reportedly lived in an old Frankish hunting lodge gifted to them by a local count. From this spot, the Neustadt Abbey arose. Charlemagne was a benefactor to the abbey and attended the consecration of its church in 793.

For more than a millennium, Benedictine monks prayed and worked at the abbey. But during the secularization of 1803, the abbey was dissolved and the remaining twenty-one monks were expelled. The last monk was Fr. Franz Kraus, the pastor under whom Fr. Link served as vicar in Pflochsbach; he died a year before Link arrived in Neustadt.

If Fr. Link had reason to lament the dissolution of the Neustadt Kloster, he owed his very existence to the destruction of another. His father, Johann Michael Link, had been a lay brother in the Kapuzinerkloster in Mannheim. In 1795, the friary was set ablaze during the French Revolutionary Wars. Johann Michael stayed to the last trying to put out the flames, but in the end the friary was lost, and with it his Capuchin vocation. His religious home in ashes, he got married and had five children. Had the revolutionaries foreseen the vocations they would engender by snuffing out Johann Michael’s, they might have reconsidered burning down his friary, for from his progeny a host of clerics and religious has come forth—parish priests and school sisters, a federal abbess and a seminary rector, missionaries to places as disparate as Tanzania and Alabama.

As Link began his apostolate in Neustadt, he determined that his mission was not simply to serve the local Catholics as their pastor but also to keep the monastic spirit alive in the ruins of the Neustadt Abbey until the monks could return. Indeed, Link believed he had been appointed by God for this task. He considered himself to be the successor of Saint Burchard in Neustadt, to whom he was so devoted that he changed his name to “Georg Burkhard Link” and attempted to conform his life to that of the eighth-century missionary Benedictine. Though a secular priest, Fr. Link dressed like a poor, simple monk. At table he had his vicar read to him from the Rule of Saint Benedict. Link made frequent pilgrimages—barefooted and in sackcloth—to the Maria Buchen shrine for the intention of the return of the monks. He pored over ancient documents in the monastery’s library and wrote one book on the history of the Neustadt Abbey and two volumes on the history of monasticism in the Diocese of Würzburg.

Link’s monastic exercises did not divert him from the care of his flock but enhanced it. He was known for his love of the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed. When a drought came to his parish, Link slaughtered his cows and gave the meat to his parishioners. After seeing elderly priests neglected, he set up a retirement fund to see to their needs. Amid the cholera outbreak during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Link went to nearby Rothenfels to care for the victims. During the Franco-Prussian War, he traveled to Alsace to retrieve wounded soldiers, whom he brought back to his rectory and there nursed back to health. Fr. Link once roughed up some corrupt politicians and was sentenced to three months in prison; King Ludwig II of Bavaria commuted the sentence to a six-week stay in a monastery (which I imagine Link enjoyed). Catholics traveled from far away to receive the counsel of the holy man people called “Burkhardus.”

Link pursued justice indefatigably. In 1870 he brought a lawsuit on behalf of his parish against the princely House of Löwenstein. When the Neustadt Abbey was dissolved, the Löwensteins had received its lands. Link argued that those properties—some having been given to the Church by Charlemagne himself—should belong to his parish. After a nine-year battle, a verdict was decided in Link’s favor, and his parish received the abbey lands back. Not satisfied, Link fought to recover more property. He won a second lawsuit five years later, which awarded his parish thirty thousand marks in compensation for other lands it had lost in 1804. Link went on to publish a book of more than seven hundred pages documenting his legal battles with the House of Löwenstein.

If the Löwenstein land affair showed that Link was wise in the ways of the world, another incident illustrated that he could also play the holy fool. To celebrate his twenty-fifth jubilee as pastor in Neustadt, Link staged a mock funeral for himself. On the afternoon of Sunday, May 18, 1873, parishioners gathered in the parish church around Link’s future coffin. Three priests from neighboring villages prayed the usual funeral prayers. Then came a solemn procession to the cemetery. Six Sunday-school children carried the coffin, followed by Link himself wearing black vestments. When they arrived at the cemetery, the coffin was placed before a crucifix in a shallow grave, and the children prayed the Five Wounds devotion for their pastor, to which the people replied, “Lord, have mercy on him.” Standing over his own grave, Link then said interment prayers for himself over his coffin.

Four days later, an article appeared in Die Bayerische Volkszeitung reporting the event, followed soon thereafter by a letter from the Bishop of Würzberg Johann Valentin von Reissmann to Link demanding that the priest give an account of what had happened. Link dutifully chronicled the mock requiem and defended his actions, arguing that no Church law had been violated. He reminded the bishop that Christians are to keep death before their eyes and have a duty to pray for the eternal salvation not just of the dead but also of the living. Link, a keen student of history, noted that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had organized a requiem Mass to be celebrated for himself prior to his death and that this had never been condemned.

Bishop von Reissmann took no further action against Link. He knew it was best to leave him alone. For a decade earlier, von Reissmann, then vicar general of the Diocese of Würzburg, was caught up in Link’s legendary Bartstreit—the battle over Fr. Link’s beard.

As Link entered his late forties and modeled his life more and more on that of his predecessor and patron Saint Burchard, he noticed something was missing: he had no beard. Now the Latin Church has long frowned upon its clerics wearing beards (in contrast to the East, where priests are expected to wear beards as a sign of manliness). A decree of an early-sixth-century council in southern Gaul states: clericus nec comam nutriat nec barbam—literally, “a cleric shall grow neither his hair nor his beard.” But the original meaning is contested. Was this a prohibition on clerics having long beards? Or on beards in general? In any event, the phrase barbam nutrire entered widely into later ecclesiastical legislation and came to be understood as a general prohibition on beards for secular clergy. The customary reasons cited were that beards were a sign of vanity and made it difficult to consume neatly the Precious Blood from the chalice. In Link’s Bavaria, in the middle of the nineteenth century, only priests belonging to certain religious orders or those who had received a dispensation for health reasons were permitted to wear a beard.

Link was not about to let mutable ecclesiastical law stop him from an ever closer imitation of Saint Burchard. Writing in 1952, Link’s last parochial vicar, Fr. Josef Riedmann, imagined Link the moment he decided to grow a beard:

In my mind, I can see the serious man standing before me, just as he used to be, a deep, brooding thinker pouring over his thoughts and ideas until he suddenly stops and exclaims: “Hmm! Why shouldn’t I grow a beard? Didn’t Saint Burchard wear a beard? Why has God, the creator of men, in all his wisdom, deigned that men grow beards? Who wouldn’t laugh if Saint Joseph, the Apostles Peter and Paul, the monks and hermits, or Saint Boniface and Saint Burchard were depicted in images with smoothly shaved faces? Were the beards of these holy men a hindrance to their blessed works and labors? Where is there a law from God or from the church that forbids wearing a beard?”

So Fr. Link decided to grow a beard. It grew on his face like a plant in fertile soil, and soon Fr. Link enjoyed a full, handsome beard. He must have felt happy about this new accoutrement for a long time, since with it, he had come one great step closer to his high ideal.

Most of Link’s parishioners were pleased with their pastor’s new beard. A few sensitive souls, however, took offense and reported the beard to the ecclesiastical authorities.

Thus it happened that one day in late 1862 Link received a letter from the Bishop of Würzburg Georg Anton von Stahl reminding him that clerics were forbidden to wear beards unless they had special permission to do so. The bishop ordered Link to explain why he had grown a beard and to remove it immediately unless he could give a just cause. Link responded with a lengthy letter defending his beard with arguments from Church history, philosophy, and theology. He concluded by recounting a tragic incident of a man who went to a barber for a shave, suffered a cut, contracted blood poisoning, and died. This story, Link told his bishop, should cause one to consider whether it is morally licit to force a man to subject himself to the barber’s blade. He humbly requested a dispensation to keep his beard. This, he thought, would be the end of the matter. He was wrong.

Ten days later, the Dean of Rothenfels Johann Joseph Schnorr presented Link with a letter from the bishop’s office. Link’s arguments for his beard were insufficient, the bishop said; besides, it had scandalized his parishioners. It must be removed at once. Dean Schnorr was asked to report back to the chancery within eight days that Link had shaved his beard.

Link was undeterred. He would demonstrate to the bishop that the main reason given against his beard—namely, that his parishioners were scandalized—was false. Link went from house to house in Neustadt and Erlach asking if anyone was opposed to his beard. When they said no, Link had the head of the household sign a statement to this effect. After collecting pages of signatures, Link sent them to the bishop as evidence that his whole parish appreciated his beard. Link told the bishop, however, that in good conscience he must admit that one parishioner would not sign: the village barber.

Ten days later, Link received an even stronger letter from the bishop, demanding him to shave at once. The bishop said that even if Link’s parishioners were not scandalized, Catholics in the neighboring parishes were. So Link made a broader circuit through the nearby towns and villages—Rothenfels, Zimmern, Ansbach, Roden, Waldzell, Rodenbach, and Pflochsbach—collecting signatures confirming that no one took offense at his beard. He sent these on to the bishop.

But the patience of the men in the Würzburg chancery had worn out. On February 19, 1863, Dean Schnorr handed Link the following monition from the bishop’s office:

Würzburg
February 9, 1863

The Reverend Dean J. Schnorr is appointed to inform, without delay, Fr. G. Link of Neustadt am Main of this peremptory notice and to make it known to him, as a third and final canonical monition:

1) That he, within eight days, is to obey the repeated order that he remove his beard, so that the public interest of the Church, rather than the private judgment of a number of parishioners, may prevail.

2) That, in the event of continued recalcitrance after the passing of this deadline, suspensio ab ordine will follow.

Notification by the Dean that protocol has positively been followed is awaited.

(Signed) Reissmann, Vicar General

Still, the obstreperous priest refused to fold. He kept his beard and wrote yet again to the bishop explaining his reasons. The bishop, however, was not bluffing and responded with the following letter:

Würzburg
March 11, 1863

With this letter, the Reverend Dean receives the following ordinance, which, according to protocol, is to be made known to Fr. Link of Neustadt am Main, without delay:

Since Fr. Link, notwithstanding the third and final canonical monition mandated by ecclesiastical decree and made known to him by the Dean according to protocol, still persisted in deplorable recalcitrance and refusal of canonical obedience as demonstrated in his letter dated the twenty-fifth of February of the current year, in accordance with the Sixth Chapter of De Reformatione of the Fourteenth Session of the Council of Trent, suspensio ab ordine et iurisdictione is ecclesiastically imposed on the same Fr. Link and takes effect immediately with this promulgation, to which an appeal merely would delay, but in no way abrogate, its juridical force. During the duration of the suspension of Fr. Link, all pastoral faculties are to be transferred to the Parochial Vicar Fr. Rügemer, who is to be instructed immediately and appropriately by the Dean, the Reverend Schnorr, to keep away from any disturbance. The Dean is to produce a report and inform us in the near future that protocol has been followed.

(Signed) Reissmann, Vicar General

Reading this letter, one might assume that Link was suspended from ministry. But in the margin of the letter is a note written in the hand of Dean Schnorr: “It was never put into effect!”

What happened?

Heeding Schnorr’s advice, Link decided to go to Würzburg to plead his case in person before Bishop von Stahl. Donning his broad traveling hat and taking up his homemade walking staff (which was as tall as Link and had several branch tines), he made the eight-hour journey to Würzburg on foot. Link arrived at the ornate episcopal palace covered in dust and still wearing his long beard. He requested an audience with the bishop. The bishop asked the name of the man wishing to see him. When he was informed it was Fr. Link from Neustadt, the bishop said, “Is he still wearing his beard?” Upon receiving an affirmative reply, Bishop von Stahl said he refused to meet with a bearded Fr. Link, but if the priest shaved, he would grant him an audience.

Link had fought valiantly for his beard, but he knew now he had reached the end. He found a barber in Würzburg and had his beard removed. Clean shaven, Link returned to the episcopal palace and had a long audience with Bishop von Stahl. No one knows what was said between the two men, but when Link returned to his rectory in Neustadt, he let his beard grow again and wore it, without ecclesiastical interference, for the rest of his life.

After his death on March 23, 1901, the priest who had once said burial prayers for himself over his own coffin was laid to rest—this time for real. On his gravestone, above the inscription “He was a priest,” it is written: “Here the earthly shell of the Reverend Fr. Georg Link awaits the future Resurrection.” During his sojourn on earth, Link strove, for the glory of God, to adorn his bodily shell with a beard. We can only expect, therefore, that when the Lord raises his good and faithful servant Fr. Link on the last day, He will reward him with a glorious, flowing beard to wear for all eternity.