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Adolph Schmitt

Roman Catholic Bishop, Council Father at the Second Vatican Council (1905–1976)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ4684344
Source-derived summary

Adolph Gregory Schmitt, C.M.M. (20 April 1905 – 5 December 1976) was a German prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He was killed by a black nationalist guerrilla during the Rhodesian Bush War in 1976.

Biography

Adolph Schmitt was born in Rimpar, Germany, ordained a priest on 19 March 1931 from the religious order of the Congregation of Mariannhill Missionaries. On 23 December 1950 Schmitt was appointed Vicar Apostolic of the then Vicariate Apostolic of Bulawayo and ordained on 2 April 1951. He retired on 9 May 1974.

Death

During the Rhodesian Bush War, on 5 December 1976, Schmitt and two of his companions, a nun and a priest, were shot by a black nationalist guerrilla on the way to a hospital visit. The sole survivor of the attack, the nun, said that their car was stopped and the guerrilla demanded money but then opened fire with a machine gun.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Adolph Schmitt” is roman Catholic Bishop, Council Father at the Second Vatican Council (1905–1976). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Adolph, Schmitt and Roman, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1905, 1976, 1931, 1950—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1905-04-20. For this dossier, Adolph, Schmitt and Roman is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “roman Catholic Bishop, Council Father at the Second Vatican Council (1905–1976)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4684344. VIAF identifies the subject as 13199277. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1905, 1976, 1931 and 1950.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Adolph Schmitt”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Adolph Schmitt primary sources, Adolph Schmitt archive and Adolph research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Adolph Schmitt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.