DIESSBACH, NICOLAUS JOSEPH ALBERT von. — Jesuit, apostle of the good press, born in Berne, into a Calvinist patrician family, on 15 February 1732, died in Vienna on 22 December 1798. At the age of fifteen he entered the Berne regiment in the service of the king of Sardinia, commanded by one of his uncles. From Calvinism he became an unbeliever, and then, in 1754, a Catholic. King Carlo Emanuele III immediately thereafter entrusted him with the command of a Sardinian regiment and charged him with the military instruction of Vittorio Amedeo III. In 1755 he married the daughter of the Spanish consul in Nice, de Saint-Pierre, who had led him to Catholicism; when his wife died in 1758, and after entrusting their little daughter to the monastery of the Visitation in Nice, he entered the Society of Jesus (1759). Ordained a priest on 22 September 1764 by the bishop of Fribourg in Switzerland, he was first assigned to Milan, and then to Turin, where he also lived after the suppression of the Society (1773).
A man of unimpeachable religious character and learning, he was a sought-after spiritual director, an apostle of the spoken word (he preached several times a day in Italian, French, and German), and a zealous educator of the young clergy, for whom, among other things, Amicizia sacerdotale (v.). He travelled extensively for purposes of apostolate and made lengthy stays in Vienna, where he went to prepare for the arrival of Pius VI in 1782 and where, Amicizia cristiana (v.), he gathered an élite group of Viennese Catholics (Baron Giuseppe Penkler, the priest Franz Schmid, the Redemptorist St. Clement Hofbauer, etc.). From them there subsequently arose the Austrian literary and artistic movement of the early nineteenth century, known as Austrian Romanticism. Above all, he was an apostle of the good press: for this purpose he founded the Amicizia cristiana; he wrote various works of asceticism and apologetics, among which the following deserves particular mention: Le chrétien catholique inviolablement attaché à la religion par la considération de quelques unes des preuves qui en établissent la certitude (3 vols., Turin 1771); he disseminated the works of St. Alfonso in Italy, France, Switzerland, Poland, and Austria in order to combat Jansenist rigorism. He presented Emperor Leopoldo II with a courageous memorandum (Adresse d'un catholique à S. M. I. et R. Leopold second roi de Hongrie et de Boème à son avènement au thrène [30 September 1790]) concerning the doctrinal errors of the time, especially Jansenism, the interests of the Church, and the restoration of the Society of Jesus. He found a valuable aid for his apostolic work in the Servant of God Pio Brunone Lanteri. These two holy priests were the pioneers of the vigorous activity devoted to the formation of the clergy of Turin and the subalpine region, which subsequently found its Convitto ecclesiastico (v.).
A. Pietro Frutaz