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Biography

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Richard Henkes was born on 26 May 1900 in the village of Ruppach in the Westerwald, in what was then the Prussian Rhine Province of the German Empire. He grew up in a Catholic family and entered the Society of the Catholic Apostolate, the congregation founded by Vincent Pallotti and commonly called the Pallottines. After novitiate and studies he made religious profession in the early 1920s and was ordained a priest on 6 June 1925 in Limburg an der Lahn, the German centre of the Pallottines. In the following years he served as a teacher in Pallottine schools and gained a reputation as an energetic preacher. His work took him to several houses of the congregation, including assignments in Upper Silesia, a border region of mixed German and Polish population, where he taught and exercised pastoral ministry among both communities.

Under National Socialist rule Henkes would not trim his preaching to the ideology of the regime. He continued religious instruction and sermons that the authorities regarded as politically unreliable, and he spoke against the injustices of the time, including the killing of the sick and disabled in the so-called euthanasia programme. Denounced for his preaching, he was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943 at Ratibor (Racibórz) in Upper Silesia. After a period of imprisonment he was transferred in July 1943 to the Dachau concentration camp and confined in the barracks reserved for clergy.

In Dachau Henkes devoted himself to the pastoral care of fellow prisoners. He learned Czech in the camp in order to minister more effectively to Czech inmates, among them seminarians, and became known for his solidarity with them. When a typhus epidemic broke out he volunteered to tend the sick in the isolation block, contracted the disease himself, and died on 22 February 1945, only weeks before Allied forces liberated the camp. Like most who died at Dachau, he has no known grave; bodies were as a rule cremated in the camp.

After the war he was remembered among the Pallottines and in the Diocese of Limburg as a priest who had remained faithful under persecution and had given his life in service to the sick. The cause for his beatification was introduced in due course. He was beatified on 15 September 2019 at a celebration in Limburg Cathedral, with Cardinal Kurt Koch presiding as representative of Pope Francis. He is venerated as Blessed Richard Henkes and has not been canonized.

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