The Randolph Society Foundation Board is pleased to announce that Father Boniface Wittenbrink, a dedicated servant who spent decades working to improve the lives of visually-impaired people, will be inducted into the 2024 class of honorees.
Boniface Leo Wittenbrink was born in Evansville in June 1914, the eighth of nine children of Max and Catherine Pautler Wittenbrink. The family was raised as part of the local community centered on St. Boniface Catholic Church. For Boniface, the church felt like a second home, and he was drawn early on to a religious calling. He embarked on the first steps toward fulfilling that vision in 1929, when he enrolled as a student at St. Henry’s Preparatory Seminary in Belleville.
After graduating from the seminary, Boniface continued his religious training in Texas before traveling to Italy in 1936 to prepare to enter the priesthood. He studied philosophy and theology at the International Scholasticate of Studies of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and Gregorian University in Rome. While he was there, he witnessed the terrifying slide toward war in Europe, as well as the death of Pope Pius XI and the coronation of his successor, Pope Pius XII. His studies were interrupted when he was ordered to return to America in 1940, just before Italy entered World War II.
Boniface was ordained by Bishop Henry Althoff on September 20, 1941, at his home church, St. Boniface in Evansville. “Father Boni,” as he would come to be known, continued to focus on education in his early years as a priest. He did advanced theological work at the University of Chicago and earned a master’s degree at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in 1947. He also returned to St. Henry’s in Belleville as a faculty member before going on to become the registrar at Our Lady of the Ozarks College. His career as a Catholic educator would eventually take him to Minnesota and California.
The lessons he learned as a teacher and mentor prepared him well for another prominent role in his life. He was tapped to serve as the leader of religious retreats across the country, guiding attendees through weekends of prayer, meditation, and reading. In 1952, he became the director of King’s House, a new retreat center in Buffalo, Minnesota. His facility with words and his ease with people led him next to Washington, D.C., where he was tapped to serve as the permanent secretary for the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in the 1960s.
While on a retreat at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville in the early 1970s, Boniface was asked to take part in a new initiative: a “Talking Book” radio project that would provide up-to-date audio content for visually-impaired listeners throughout the St. Louis area. The nondenominational radio station programming would seek volunteers to read daily newspaper and magazine articles, providing blind people with more updated news and information than they could gather from many available sources. Volunteers would also read books, and the station would eventually feature live talk shows geared toward visually-impaired audiences, as well as sports coverage and other topics of interest.
Though he had no previous experience working with blind persons, Boniface accepted the job and capably shepherded the project toward success. He used his talents as a fundraiser to help raise money to support the project, and after the Talking Book, now called MindsEye, was launched, he reached out to help others start similar initiatives around the country. For four decades, Boniface was a key part of the success of the project, which continues to reach listeners today. He was recognized with numerous awards for his contributions, and when he lost his own sight late in life, he was able to join the ranks of MindsEye listeners himself.
Boniface passed away in Belleville in June 2017, just before his 103rd birthday. He was remembered as a person dedicated to making the lives of others better–not just spiritually but also through education and community connections. After his death, one friend and colleague noted that “our world is a better place” because Boniface existed in it, challenging us all to look for ways to use our own talents to better our communities.
Click here to read a more detailed biography of Father Boniface Wittenbrink.
The Randolph Society 