Those brothers to whom the Lord has given the grace of working may work faithfully and devotedly . . . In March 1858, Bishop Junker of Alton, Illinois, knocked on the door of the Franciscan friary in Paderborn, Westphalia, Germany, and asked to see the Very Reverend Father Provincial. The bishop needed priests and had a letter of recommendation from the Bishop of Paderborn, who had told him that the Provincial was a very young man. So the forty-eight year old Bishop was not surprised when the twenty-eight year old Father Gregory Janknecht presented himself as the Minister Provincial of the Recollect Franciscan Province of the Holy Cross, also called the Province of Saxony. Father Gregory was excited at the opportunity for the friars to come to America. In April, after consulting with his definitorium, Gregory promised to send two friar priests and wrote to the Bishop, "Do not be concerned about a residence. For a beginning, it is sufficient to know that there is a fold which is need of shepherds who will teach them and administer the sacraments to them. The rest will take care of itself. When our Father St. Francis founded his order, he was destitute of all material possessions. The two fathers who will establish a mission in your diocese will consider themselves happy to become at least in some measure similar to their holy founder; for, they will strive to imitate him in poverty, humility, zeal for souls, and holy obedience, as their rule requires of them." Into whatever house they enter, let our friars first say: "Peace be to this house!" For there have been times when we have known no peace: In May of 1875, the government of Otto von Bismarck issued the infamous May Laws, which decreed the closing of all monastaries, convents and houses of religious men and women throughout Prussia and the expulsion of all religious except those who cared for the sick. All the friaries of Holy Cross Province were to be closed and all the friars banished from their homeland if they persevered in their vocations! Amazingly, the Minister Provincial, Gregory Janknecht, was ready. He had carefully made plans anticipating the worst from the government, and the friars were able to carry them out as though it were merely a matter of a regular transfer within the community, though this was a transfer of all the Province's 260 friars! The older friars went to Holland and Belgium, where places had been prepared for them. The clerics, young brothers and candidates, along with their friar instructors, set sail for the United States. There was not a single defection among the young friars. 103 friars and candidates fled the Kulturkampf in 1875 and 1876 to become part of Sacred Heart Commissariat, soon to be Sacred Heart Province. The Lord says: Behold I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore, be prudent as serpents and simple as doves. Let any brother, then, who desires by divine inspiration to go among the Saracens and other nonbelievers, go with the permission of his minister and servant. If he sees they are fit to be sent, the minister may give them permission and not oppose them, for he will be bound to render an accounting to the Lord if he has proceeded without discernment in this and other matters. The first Catholic priest to go from the United States to China was Remy Goette. Born in Germany in 1856, he entered the Franciscan order in 1873 and was driven from his native land, along with two younger brothers, during the Kulturkampf of 1875, when his brothers Athanasius and John Capistran were novices. Remy was ordained in St. Louis in 1880 and left for China the next year, having returned his membership to the mother Province in Germany. He would serve as a missionary to China for almost forty years, dying there in 1920. Athanasius would go to China in 1883 and in 1905 became the first American missionary bishop in China. When a typhoid epidemic broke out in 1908, Bishop Athanasius ministered to its victims himself until he caught the disease and died at the age of fifty-one. John Capistran arrived in China in 1884 and served there until 1919, some thirty-five years, enduring various trials and nearly being beaten to death by fanatically anti-Western Chinese partisans in 1895.