WOLFF, GEORGE DERING. - Journalist, b. at Martinsburg (western Virginia) on 25 Aug. 1822, d. at Norristown (Pennsylvania) on 26 Jan. 1894.
Born of a Reformed Church minister in Pennsylvania, Wolff was set on becoming a minister himself, but after long spiritual crises, in 1871, already in his fifties, he entered the Roman Church. A journalist of wide renown, he then founded the Catholic Mirror of Baltimore, followed by the Catholic Standard of Philadelphia. In 1876, at the invitation of James J. Corcoran and Fr. O’Connor—later Bishop and Apostolic Vicar of Nebraska—he also founded the American Catholic Quarterly Review in Philadelphia, to which his numerous articles on the dogmatic differences of the various Protestant Churches gave notable importance: a subject which Wolff knew thoroughly. The review thus became one of the most authoritative voices of American Catholicism, carrying out an extremely effective work of clarification and persuasion among the educated classes.