John W. Beschter

John W. Beschter

John William Beschter was a Catholic priest and Jesuit from the Duchy of Luxembourg in the Austrian Netherlands. He emigrated to the United States as a missionary in 1807, where he ministered in rural Pennsylvania and Maryland. He aligned himself with the Continental European Jesuits in the U.S., who endorsed a monarchist view of ecclesiastical leadership.

About John W. Beschter in brief

Summary John W. BeschterJohn William Beschter was a Catholic priest and Jesuit from the Duchy of Luxembourg in the Austrian Netherlands. He emigrated to the United States as a missionary in 1807, where he ministered in rural Pennsylvania and Maryland. He was the last Jesuit pastor of St. Mary’s Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as well as the pastor of St. John the Evangelist Church in Baltimore, Maryland. His ministerial work was punctuated by a time as master of novices at the new Jesuit novitiate in White Marsh, Maryland, and a brief term as president of Georgetown College in 1829. He is next noted as an assistant curate to Louis de Barth de Barth in Adams County, Pennsylvania in 1816. He died on January 6, 1842, and was buried in Paradise, Pennsylvania.

He anglicized his name to John William BesChter, S.J., on October 10, 1807; he was admitted to the Society of Jesus in October 1807. He also served as a professor of German at Georgetown for a year, before returning to Paradise where he lived out the last twelve years of his life as a priest. In 1814, he escorted the first group of Jesuit novices from Frederick, Maryland to White Marsh where they arrived on July 12, 1814. For some time during that year, he acted as master of novice at White Marsh. He aligned himself with the Continental European Jesuits in the U.S., who endorsed a monarchist view of ecclesiastical leadership.