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Biography

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Johann Philipp Jeningen was born on 5 January 1642 in Eichstätt, seat of an ecclesiastical principality in the Holy Roman Empire. His father served in the city’s administration. He was educated at the Jesuit college in Eichstätt and continued his studies at the University of Ingolstadt, where the Society of Jesus was a dominant intellectual and spiritual presence. Drawn to the Jesuit missionary ideal, he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Landsberg am Lech in 1663. After the customary formation in the humanities, philosophy, and theology, he was ordained a priest in 1672.

Although he repeatedly asked to be sent to the overseas missions, especially in Asia in the spirit of Francis Xavier, his superiors assigned him to pastoral work in the German-speaking lands. After some years of teaching and ministry he was stationed at Ellwangen, a princely Benedictine abbey town in Swabia, which remained his base from about 1680 until his death. From Ellwangen he undertook extensive popular missions through the Nördlinger Ries and neighboring districts, a region still marked by the religious divisions of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. He became known as a preacher, confessor, and catechist, and later generations called him the Apostle of the Ries.

A central concern of his work was Marian pilgrimage at the Schönenberg, a hill overlooking Ellwangen. He promoted the building of a new baroque pilgrimage church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary there in the later seventeenth century, encouraged the rural population to visit the shrine, and was himself a frequent pilgrim. Contemporary witnesses described an austere personal life, long hours in the confessional, care for the poor and sick, and a reputation for holiness; reports of favors attributed to his prayer circulated already in his lifetime.

Jeningen died in Ellwangen on 8 February 1704 and was buried at the Schönenberg church, which remained a place of local veneration. A formal cause of beatification was opened in the twentieth century, and he was later declared Venerable. After the Holy See recognized a miracle attributed to his intercession, he was beatified on 16 July 2022 in Ellwangen, with Cardinal Kurt Koch presiding as legate of Pope Francis. His liturgical memorial is observed on 8 February.

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