Stanislus

Here is an interesting PERSONALITY, but not for the Readers Digest. I don't know whom it if for.

When Von Klein came to ZA. he was a mystery man. As time pealed down layer after layer he remained a mystery to the end. If anyone can understand him, tell me.

He had met Emilie Kalk when she was out with papers getting donations and Von Klein said he was Catholic but that Sister Emilie was the most saintly nun he had ever met. It was love at first sight. As his later actions proved, it was not ordinary love, but a seeing of the Virgin Mary or the Christ in human form, an ideal for veneration and spiritual adoration. The word for worship in Latin is something like adoration.

At ZA he was put at washing pots and mopping floors, literally. We being curious or interested would talk to him and he would tell of his being a graduate of Heidelberg, being on familiar terms with Catholic Bishops and Monseigneurs and speaking all languages. Some wrote him off as a bag of wind of which the world had plenty, who learn a superficial patina with no real learning, a few words and phrases of various languages with no foundation. But others saw it was not quite so simple.

At times there WERE more depths. I asked him if he was a learned man mopping floors, and he gave me an insight I had not had, have never forgotten, when he began telling of one saint after another, educated and noblemen, who had chosen such tasks in monasteries, and feeling the Lord drawing near to them as they suffered a bit in humility with and for Him.

In evangelistic circles all ancient Catholic studies and attitudes were cast aside. But then one sees so many religious want recognition, fame and power, and it is obvious they have gone too far in that direction. Such ideas are not just ancient Catholic. They are Christian and Biblical. Washing pots brings scorn from the limited. The greater or broader man will soon learn of the true values beneath the surface, and the pot washer will emerge as a great man also.

That is speaking in the generality. Specifically, Von Kevin Klein did have some windy imaginations. He used to tell of adventures, impossible stories delighting the children, but he insisted they were true accounts of his personal happenings. He had fallen into a frozen river, came up beneath the ice and was carried downriver three miles before he found another open spot and climbed out. The kids enjoyed laughing at him as much as with him at those tales. I would kindly hint that he should separate the dreams and fantasies from the true statements, so we could believe the parts of his wide studies. But he would answer in total seriousness and honesty that it actually happened to him in that way. I would say that such and such a story was from Doestevyeski I had already read. He was unfazed.

It did turn out he knew many well educated people, He did know languages well enough to work on Ellis Island as an interpreter. There are just some kinds of minds that can't separated their fantasies from their true experiences.

He was a Christian in many deep and consecrated ways, but he could lie with all candor. He had many Jewish characteristics, but always denied it, showing scorn and surprise at the ridiculous suggestion. He was from a noble Polish-German family, and had been Catholic before being Pillar of Fire. When he got aged and ill, he wanted things Jewish and gave directions that he was to be buried as a Jew with his Jewish relatives.

Meanwhile he was ordained a Pillar of Fire minister. No one knew what doctrine he preached, but he surely worked long and hard and brought in tens of thousands of dollars, back then when that was worth something. Who could argue with that kind of Gospel.

He used to say of Alma White that she was one between a million, apparently with the sincerity he had formerly reserved for the Virgin Mary. He considered my father to be out of this world, so spiritual as to be more in heaven than out, perhaps nearly as saintly as Saint Emilie.

To repeat my former question in conclusion, how could a learned man accept in good grace the floor mopping jobs, but then pause to show off some very philosophic poetry he had written to someone passing, and that piece of literature turn out to have been copied from one of the masters? Double contradictions on top of good sense and real learning.

Explain a bit more on this to me, please.