Paulus Moritz

Paulus Moritz (29 June 1869 – 19 November 1942) was a German Roman Catholic cleric and founder of a minor branch of the Franciscan order.

Moritz was born in Königsberg, Prussia, to Jewish parents and was named Heymann Hermann Moritz. He received his Jewish and primary education in Königsberg.

With regard to his conversion to Catholicism there is hardly any traceable record. It could have taken place around his 16th or 17th year of life. After this, one finds him next in the historic city of Cologne. Here he became a close associate of the veteran Jesuit missionary to British India, the late Antonius Maria Bodewig.

Moritz joined the Missionary Society of the Immaculate Conception founded by Bodewig as one of its first members. However, this Missionary Society never took off the ground. A group of its members sent to the Belgian Capuchin-run Lahore Mission in 1895 was stranded there. Its leader was one Nicholas Ludwig Hohn, a close friend of Moritz, hailing from Bonn. The Belgian Capuchin Bishop of Lahore constituted the stranded group of German youth in his diocese into a Congregation of Franciscan Tertiary Brothers whose services he hoped to enlist for the diocese.

Moritz broke with Bodewig by 1899 and associated himself with the new Diocesan Congregation of Lahore. Around this time, he had also knotted a firm relationship with the French Fransalian Bishop Msgr. Pelvat of Nagpur, headquarters of the Province of Central India & Berars.

In November 1890, Moritz arrived in India with a few associates. He went to Nagpur from where he, in January 1901, proceeded to Lahore where Bishop Pelkmans admitted him into the Franciscan order and appointed him the of the new congregation. He then returned to the Nagpur group of his Brothers.

However, his relationship with Msgr. Pelkmans had been a stormy one and he finally broke off with him and constituted his group into a separate congregation under the Fransalian Bishop Jean Marie Crochet of Nagpur as the Congregation of the Missionary Brothers of St. Francis of Assisi, or C.M.S.F.. This was on 21 February 1901. Moritz was chosen as the Superior-General of the new congregation and Hohn as the Asst. Superior-General. The community chose to retain its Franciscan character, i.e., remain within the Franciscan order as an constituent congregation.

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