Mayerhoffer, V. P. Twelve Years a Roman Catholic Priest, or, the Autobiography of the Rev. V. P. Mayerhoffer, M. A., Late Military Chaplain to the Austrian Army, and Grand Chaplain of the Orders of Freemasons and Orangemen, in Canada, B. N. A. Toronto: Rowsell & Ellis, Printers, 1861. First Edition. [10548]
Cloth, title & decoration to front, 7 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches, spotting to the back cover, joints fine, tight. Wood engraved portrait by J. W. Orr with printed signature and tissue guard. 340, [2] clean pp. Includes an account of his funeral. Good. Hardcover.
Title continues: Containing an Account of his Career as Military Chaplain, Monk of the Order of St. Francis, and Clergyman of the Church of England in Vaughan, Markham and Whitby, C. W.
About 1/3 of the book is his Autobiography, with 2/3rds being an Examination and Refutation of the Doctrines of the Church of Rome.
Vincent Philip Mayerhoffer (1874-1859), b. Raab (Györ, Hungary); d. Whitby, Upper Canada. Mayerhoffer was born into a Roman Catholic family of small means, and as a youth was apprenticed to a grocer and then to a baker. About 1804 he entered a Franciscan novitiate in Yugoslavia and in 1807 "received all seven ecclesiastical orders up to deacon and priest." After serving in two parishes he was appointed a garrison chaplain and in 1812 as chaplain of the 60th Infantry Regiment in the Austrian army. In 1813 he was captured by Napoleon's troops, escaped and rejoined his regiment and was with them in France, Italy, and Switzerland.
"In 1819 he immigrated to North America and was appointed a missionary in Pennsylvania but, after harrowing disputes with the Jesuits at Conewago, described in his autobiography, Mayerhoffer, long disillusioned with Roman Catholicism, left the church on 20 March 1820."
About the year 1822 he joined the German Reformed Church and in 1826 was stationed in Buffalo, New York, preaching in German to four congregations, including one across the border in Upper Canada. Meyerhoffer soon aligned himself with the Episcopal Church, and in 1829 was sent as a missionary to several German-speaking congregations north of Toronto. He became embroiled in the political difficulties of the time which were also expressed in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches; in fact, he was locked out of church buildings and broke locks to get back into them. In 1854 he was "informed that never again shall he function as a clergyman, [and] retired to Whitby where he finished his autobiography, appending a lengthy diatribe against the 'putrid carcase' of Roman Catholicism." - quotations from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, online.
