He established in the US a province of the missionary society to which he belonged, the Society of African Missions, and was also instrumental in founding the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, the third-oldest surviving congregation of Black nuns in America, as well as a racially integrated seminary, St. Anthony's Mission House.

He was born on 6 April 1867 to Nicholas Lissner and Anna Marie Spehner, the youngest of nine children, in Wolxheim, Bas-Rhin, in the region of Alsace in France.

His father, a descendant of Jews from Poland, had converted to Catholicism, and he was raised in a devoutly Catholic home, from which five children were to enter service in the Church.

[1] After his ordination, Lissner was assigned to serve in Whydah in the Kingdom of Dahomey, which was then undergoing increasing control by France.

In the summer of 1892, several months after his arrival, an insurrection among the native population broke out and many of the missionaries in the region fled the town.

[3] Kitchener's successor, Reginald Wingate, granted Lissner and the other SMA priests authority to establish missions in the occupied state.

The expectation that there would be organized outreach to the general population of ex-slaves after the American Civil War had not been met, as the system of recruiting specialists for the "Colored Mission", as it was called, had little success.

[1] In January 1907, under Lissner's direction, two priests of the Society took charge of St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church in Savannah, Georgia.

[4] Lissner himself went to Rome to present his plans for the missions entrusted to his care, receiving the blessing of Pope Pius X for this work.

Over the next six years, Lissner went on to found a series of parishes and parochial schools to serve the blacks of rural Georgia (including Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Atlanta).

The members of the Society carried out this work in the face of a lack of support from their colleagues among the local Catholic clergy and of hostility from the Ku Klux Klan.

Williams, under Lissner's authority and guidance, was joined by other black women to found the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary,[4] a congregation open to receiving members regardless of race.

Having no real financial resources, however, they resorted to running a laundry and begging to support themselves, and faced a daily struggle for their survival as a community.

He received the support and funding for this project from the Philadelphia heiress and nun Katharine Drexel, S.B.S., who had dedicated her life and fortune to this same population and had formed a strong friendship with him from the time of his initial visit to America.

In this way, the institutions could be developed to recruit and train American men for missionary work and to establish sources of financial support.

This work progressed to the satisfaction of the superiors of the Society, and a Blessed Martin de Porres Mission in Tucson, Arizona was opened in 1940.

Recruitment of young men became almost impossible due to the military draft and travel restrictions interfered with the ability of the new Provincial Council to meet and coordinate the work of the Province.

His strong determination to continue this work found opposition from the Ku Klux Klan, some White leaders and local priests and sometimes even from bishops.