Diessbach, Nikolaus Joseph Albert von

DIESSBACH, NIKOLAUS JOSEPH ALBERT VON. - Jesuit, apostle of the good press, b. in Bern, of a patrician Calvinist family, on 15 February 1732, d. in Vienna on 22 December 1798. At the age of 15 he entered the Bern regiment, in the pay of the king of Sardinia, commanded by an uncle of his. From a Calvinist he became an unbeliever, and then in 1754 a Catholic. King Charles Emmanuel III immediately afterward entrusted him with the command of a Sardinian regiment and charged him with the military instruction of Victor Amadeus III. In 1755 he married the daughter of the Spanish consul at Nice, of Saint-Pierre, who had brought him to Catholicism; when his wife died in 1758 and their little daughter had been entrusted to the monastery of the Visitation at 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, then to Turin, where he lived even after the suppression of the Society (1773).

A man of the strictest integrity and cultured, he was a sought-after director of consciences, an apostle of the spoken word (he preached even several times a day in Italian, French and German) and a zealous educator of the young clergy, for whom he established, among other things, the Amicizia sacerdotale (v.). He traveled a great deal for the purpose of the apostolate, and made long stays in Vienna, where he went to prepare for the arrival of Pius VI in 1782 and where he gathered, in the Amicizia cristiana (v.), a select band of Viennese Catholics (Baron Joseph Penkler, the priest Franz Schmid, the Redemptorist St. Clement Hofbauer, etc.), from whom there later arose the Austrian literary and artistic movement of the early nineteenth century, known under the name of Austrian Romanticism. He was above all an apostle of the good press: for this purpose he created the Amicizia cristiana; he wrote various works of asceticism and apologetics, among which particular mention deserves: 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 spread throughout Italy, France, Switzerland, Poland and Austria the works of St. Alphonsus, in order to combat Jansenist rigorism. He presented to Emperor Leopold II a courageous memorial (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 re-establishment of the Society of Jesus. He found a valuable help for his works of the apostolate in the servant of God Pius Brunone Lanteri. These two holy priests were the pioneers of the intense work for the formation of the clergy of Turin and the subalpine region, which later had its driving center in the Convitto ecclesiastico (v.).

A. Pietro Frutaz