Clemens Maria Hofbauer

Clement Mary Hofbauer was born Johannes Hofbauer on 26 December 1751 in the village of Taßwitz (today Tasovice) in Moravia, then a crown land of the Habsburg Monarchy. He was the ninth of twelve children of Paul Hofbauer, a butcher and small farmer, and Maria Steer. The early death of his father left the family in poverty and blocked the schooling required for the priesthood, a vocation he had felt from childhood. He was apprenticed as a baker and later worked in that trade at the Premonstratensian monastery of Bruck. In his spare hours he studied Latin, served at the altar, and several times walked as a pilgrim from the Danube lands to Rome. For a period he lived as a hermit in the hills near Tivoli in the Papal States, taking the name Clement in religion, before returning to Vienna, where he attended university lectures as a working student.

In 1784, during another stay in Rome, he and his companion Thaddäus Hübl were received into the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the missionary institute founded in the Kingdom of Naples by Alphonsus Liguori. Hofbauer was ordained priest in March 1785. The two were sent to establish the Redemptorists north of the Alps, a region then dominated by Josephinist state control of the Church, which was hostile to new religious foundations. After unsuccessful attempts in Austrian territory they accepted an invitation to Warsaw. From 1787 Hofbauer directed the German national church of St. Benno and built up a large community of priests and brothers. They preached in several languages, conducted popular missions, ran a free school for poor children, and maintained an orphanage and other works of charity. The house became a center of Catholic renewal amid the political upheavals of late eighteenth-century Poland. In 1808, after the creation of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw, the government suppressed the community and expelled the Redemptorists. Hofbauer and his companions were forced to leave.

He then settled in Vienna, where he remained until his death. Josephinist legislation still forbade him to open a canonical Redemptorist monastery, so he lived outwardly as a secular priest while remaining bound to his congregation. He served as confessor and chaplain to the Ursuline nuns, preached in parish churches, and became a sought-after spiritual director. Around him gathered a circle of converts and Catholic intellectuals associated with the Romantic movement, including Friedrich von Schlegel and his wife Dorothea, the dramatist Zacharias Werner, and other writers and artists of the capital. Hofbauer opposed the remnants of Josephinism and the influence of Enlightenment rationalism on religious life, urging a return to sacramental practice, popular devotion, and the freedom of religious orders. He repeatedly petitioned the imperial court for legal recognition of the Redemptorists in Austria. Though he did not live to see that recognition granted, his personal prestige and the network he formed prepared the way for the congregation’s establishment in the Habsburg lands soon after his death. Contemporaries already called him the Apostle of Vienna.

Hofbauer died in Vienna on 15 March 1820 after a period of declining health. He was first buried at Maria Enzersdorf; in 1862 his remains were translated to the church of Maria am Gestade in Vienna, which had been entrusted to the Redemptorists. Popular veneration spread rapidly in Austria and throughout the congregation. Pope Leo XIII beatified him in 1888, and Pope Pius X canonized him on 20 May 1909, presenting him as a model of missionary zeal in the cities of modern Europe. He is invoked as a patron of Vienna and of bakers, recalling both his long pastoral labor in the Austrian capital and the trade of his youth. His feast is kept on 15 March.