PREUSS, ARTHUR

Editor, lay theologian; b. St. Louis, Mo., March 22, 1871; d. there, Dec. 16, 1934. The son of Edward Preuss, convert and editor of the St. Louis Amerika, German Catholic daily, Preuss was educated at Canisius College, Buffalo, New York, and St. Francis College, Quincy, Illinois (M.A. 1890). After a year on the Amerika staff, he went to Chicago in 1892 as editor of Der Weltbürger, Katholisches Sonntagsblatt, and Die Glocke. On April 1, 1894, he began his own Chicago Review. He moved this to St. Louis in July 1895, where he again worked on the Amerika staff while continuing his own magazine, retitled the Catholic Fortnightly Review (1905–11) and the Fortnightly Review (1912–35). His magazine was important because of its independent and courageous opinions on such controversial questions as the faribault plan, Cahenslyism (see cahensly, peter paul), Americanization of the foreign-born, especially Germans, the mcglynn case, and most contemporary issues affecting the Church.

From 1896 to 1934, Preuss was literary editor for theB. Herder Book Co. of St. Louis, for which he translated three German theological texts, Joseph Pohle's oftenprinted 12-volume Dogmatic Theology (cited as Pohle-Preuss), Johannes Brunsmann's four-volume Fundamental Theology (1928–32), and Anthony Koch's 5-volume Moral Theology (3d ed. 1918). His own three books were: The Fundamental Fallacy of Socialism (1908), A Study in American Freemasonry (1908), and A Dictionary of Secret and Other Societies (1924). He also edited the one-volume translation of Hartmann Grisar's Martin Luther (1935) and the two-volume Meditations for Religious (1935) by Johannes Janssen. He served as literary adviser to the Society of the Divine Word Press at Techny, Illinois, and was a contributor to the Catholic papers the Echo of Buffalo, New York, and the Wanderer of St. Paul, Minnesota. He refused all of many honors offered except a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame.

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