DIESSBACH, NICOLAUS JOSEPH ALBERT von. – Jesuit, apostle of good printing, b. at Berna, into a patrician Calvinist family, on 15 Feb. 1732, d. at Vienna on 22 Dec. 1798. At the age of 15 he entered the regiment of Berna, in the service of the King of Sardinia, under the command of an uncle. From Calvinist he became an unbeliever, and then in 1754 a Catholic. King Charles Emmanuel III entrusted him immediately afterwards 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, de Saint-Pierre, who had brought him to Catholicism; after his wife’s death in 1758 and the entrusting of his little daughter to the monastery of the Visitation at Nice, he entered the Society of Jesus (1759). Ordained priest on 22 Sept. 1764 by the Bishop of Fribourg in Switzerland, he was first sent to Milan, then to Turin, where he remained even after the suppression of the Society (1773).
A man of the most exemplary piety and learning, he was a sought-after director of souls, an apostle of the word (he preached several times a day in Italian, French and German), and a zealous educator of the young clergy, for whom he founded among other things the Amicizia sacerdotale (q.v.). He travelled extensively for apostolic purposes, making long stays in Vienna, whither he went to prepare for the arrival of Pius VI in 1782, and where he gathered, in the Amicizia cristiana (q.v.), an elect band of Viennese Catholics (Baron Joseph Penkler, the priest Franz Schmid, the Redemptorist St Clement Hofbauer, etc.), from whom later sprang the literary and artistic movement of Austrian Romanticism in the early 19th century. Above all, however, he was an apostle of good printing: to this end he founded the Amicizia cristiana; he wrote various works of ascetical and apologetical character, among which deserves particular mention Le chrétien catholique inébranlablement attaché à la religion par la considération de quelques unes des preuves qui en établissent la certitude (3 vols., Turin 1771); he spread in 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 memorandum (Adresse d'un catholique à S. M. I. et R. Léopold second roi de Hongrie et de Boème à son événement au thème [30 Sept. 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 helper for his apostolic labours in the Servant of God Pius Brunone Lanteri. These two saintly priests were the pioneers of the intense activity for the formation of the clergy of Turin and the subalpine regions, which later had its driving centre in the Convitto ecclesiastico (q.v.).