"One Sunday in the summer of 1866 something unheard of happened at St. Joseph’s Church (Ohio). Several young ladies, egged on by their dissatisfied parents…entered church wearing the new style of clothes with hoop skirts. They also decorated their dresses and bonnets with colorful ribbons and flowers. This was anathema to Fr. Albrecht… Father read the girls a strong lecture on vanity and pride and forbade them to return to church wearing such frivolous dress. If they did appear in church so dressed, he would drive them out. At Vespers that evening the girls defied the pastor’s ultimatum and attended services in all their finery. This disobedience was very upsetting to Fr. Albrecht and he very firmly strode to the pulpit, read a passage from Holy Scripture condemning vanity in dress, then picked up a hickory stick… and chastened the screaming girls out of church.
“His enemies immediately reported the incident to Archbishop Purcell of Cincinatti. The Archbishop replied that hoop skirts and frills were not evil but only current fashion and that Father Albrecht should rescind these rules, apologize for what he said and did, and allow more social freedom in the activities of his parish. When Fr. Albrect failed to do this, and in fact preached against the laxity of morals of the clergy as well as the laity, the Archbishop suspended him and took away his priestly faculties.”
Although Fr. Albrecht wrote a letter in October to his archbishop in Ohio, retracting what he said and asking for reconciliation, he left Ohio for Minnesota without having reconciled officially. After relocating his community in Minnesota, he walked a journey of 200 miles (he was almost 70 at the time) to meet with the Bishop in St. Paul. When he arrived to find the Bishop was not there, he took it as a personal insult. He refused to wait until the Bishop returned, walked back home, and resumed saying Mass. When his Bishop heard of this, he put the church under interdict and excommunicated Father Albrecht, who was from that time forward a formal schismatic. He died in March 1884, having never had the excommunication formally lifted–he decided the great period of grace given by Pope Pius IX during the Jubilee absolved him–a fact of which his parishioners were unaware.
