The Man Who Arrived with Three Silver Coins
When Clement Mary Hofbauer arrived in Warsaw in 1787 to plant the Redemptorist order north of the Alps — the mission his entire priesthood had been ordered toward — he gave away his last three silver coins to beggars on the road before he reached the city. He arrived with nothing. He was thirty-five years old, newly ordained, trained in Rome, and now standing in the capital of a country he had never visited, whose language he could not speak, with no money, no congregation, no church, and no guarantee that anyone would listen to him.
This was the pattern of his life. Clement Mary Hofbauer was the ninth of twelve children born to a butcher in Moravia. His father died when he was six. He worked as a baker's boy, then as a servant in a monastery, then as a hermit — twice, and in two different countries — before two women he had never met decided, on the strength of a conversation after Mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, to pay for his seminary studies. He was thirty-three years old before he could even begin to move toward ordination. He was expelled from Warsaw after twenty-one years of apostolic labor there by a decree Napoleon signed at a general's request. He rebuilt from nothing in Vienna, where the Emperor's chancellor accused him of being a spy and threatened him with banishment. The legal approval for the Redemptorists to establish a permanent house north of the Alps arrived — signed, sealed, official — on the day he died.
He never saw the order established. He saw everything else: the confessional lines that stretched around the church in Warsaw, the orphans fed by bread he baked himself, the Romantic intellectuals of Vienna baptized and brought back to the faith, the plan for a German national church that would have severed Austria from Rome quietly killed. Pope Pius VII said, upon learning of his death: "Religion in Austria has lost its chief support."
He had been a baker. He had become the man who held up a country's faith.
The Moravia He Was Born Into: Josephinism and Its Damage
Clement was born on December 26, 1751, in Tasswitz, Moravia — a small town in what is now the Czech Republic, part of the vast Habsburg domains. The name the family used, Hofbauer, was the German equivalent of their original Czech name, DvoΕΓ‘k. The father was a grazier and butcher. There were twelve children. The ninth was the boy who would become a saint, baptized Johannes — known to the family as Hansl.
The world he was born into was being systematically unmade by the man who would come to rule it. Emperor Joseph II, who came to power in 1780, was the foremost practitioner in Catholic Europe of what became known as Josephinism: the policy of subordinating the Church entirely to the state, abolishing monasteries that did not serve a demonstrably social function, closing seminaries and replacing them with state-controlled institutions, suppressing religious orders, and subjecting theology itself to the rationalizing scrutiny of the Enlightenment bureaucracy. By the time Clement was a young man trying to find his way to the priesthood, the path had been all but blocked. All seminaries had been closed. The state's universities offered theology courses saturated with rationalism. Religious communities could not accept new candidates. The structures through which a young man from a poor family might have entered the priesthood in his own country had been methodically dismantled.
This was not mere inconvenience. It was a theological catastrophe being administered through law. Thousands of Catholics in the German-speaking lands and beyond were left without priests, without the sacraments, without the religious instruction that sustained Catholic life. The suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 had already stripped large portions of Catholic Europe of its best-trained missionaries and teachers. Josephinism completed what the Jesuit suppression had begun, leaving a generation of Catholics in the German world spiritually orphaned.
Clement spent his boyhood and young manhood inside this catastrophe, looking for a way through it.
The Baker, the Hermit, the Pilgrim: A Vocation Made in Detours
He apprenticed as a baker after his father's death. At nineteen he became a servant in the Premonstratensian monastery at Klosterbruck, near Znaim, where the monks allowed him to attend classes at the monastery's Latin school and where he began the slow, interrupted education that would eventually bring him to ordination. He stayed four years. He left, tried the life of a hermit in the forests of Moravia, found it impossible to sustain a permanent hermitage under Josephinian law, returned to Vienna, worked as a baker again — this time in the city — and eventually, with a friend named Peter Kunzmann, walked on pilgrimage to Rome.
He walked. It was the first of three such pilgrimages, undertaken on foot, because that was what he could afford. The third pilgrimage, in 1784, was when everything changed.
He went with a friend named Thaddeus HΓΌbl. They had stopped at the church of San Giuliano on the Esquiline in Rome, drawn there early one morning by the sound of a bell, and found a community of priests in deep and recollected prayer before Mass. Clement asked an altar server what kind of priests these were. Redemptorists, the boy said. And someday you, too, will be one of them.
The Redemptorists had been founded by Alphonsus Liguori — still alive at the time, though old and nearly blind — for a specific purpose: the preaching of missions to the most abandoned, the rural poor who had been left without adequate pastoral care. Their spirituality was apostolic and intense, their charism exactly what Clement's whole formation had been reaching toward without a name. The two men presented themselves to the Superior. They were received into the novitiate.
But before they could even complete their theological training, the Emperor's government had forced all seminaries to close. They studied at the University of Vienna — theology courses pervaded by Josephinism and Enlightenment rationalism that Clement found genuinely disturbing — and managed to get through it. They professed their Redemptorist vows on March 19, 1785, the feast of Saint Joseph. They were ordained priests ten days later, on March 29.
Clement was thirty-three years old. He had been trying to reach ordination for more than a decade.
The Perpetual Mission of Saint Benno's: Warsaw, 1787–1808
The Josephinian system made it impossible to establish a Redemptorist house in Vienna. Clement and Thaddeus turned north and east, to Warsaw, where the apostolic delegate Archbishop Saluzzo received them and placed them in charge of Saint Benno's Church — the German national church of Warsaw — to serve the large German-speaking Catholic population that the suppression of the Jesuits had left priestless.
They arrived with no money. Clement had given the last coins away on the road. What they built over the next twenty-one years was, by any measure, one of the most remarkable apostolates in eighteenth-century European Catholicism.
At Saint Benno's, the Redemptorists instituted what they called the Perpetual Mission. Every weekday was a full mission day. A person who walked into Saint Benno's on any ordinary day of the year would hear five sermons — two in German, three in Polish — attend three solemn High Masses, pray the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, make a public visit to the Blessed Sacrament, walk the Way of the Cross, sing Vespers, attend prayer services, and participate in litanies. A confessor was available at any hour, day or night. In 1787, the church received two thousand communicants in a year. By 1800, that number had risen to over one hundred thousand.
Clement meanwhile was begging on the streets of Warsaw to feed orphan boys. He baked bread for them himself when there was no money for food. When a man in a tavern, approached for a donation, spat beer in his face, Clement wiped it off and said: That was for me. Now what do you have for my boys? The men in the tavern gave him more than a hundred silver coins. He was not performing a lesson in humility. He needed the coins.
The school he founded served 256 boys and 187 girls — the latter making it Warsaw's only school for girls — with tuition free and many students housed on site because they had no homes. He founded an orphanage. He ran missions in French and German to Protestants and Jews, some of whom converted. He founded new Redemptorist houses in Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere in Poland, sending missionaries north and west with the same energy he had brought to Saint Benno's. His closest collaborator and friend, Thaddeus HΓΌbl, died in 1807 — a loss that left Clement without his first and oldest companion. He absorbed it and continued.
Then, in June 1808, the order came from Paris: Napoleon had signed a decree suppressing the Redemptorists in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Marshal Davout's troops took them from their church. The prisoners were transported to the fortress of KΓΌstrin, held there for four weeks, then released — and forbidden to return to Poland.
Twenty-one years. Five sermons a day. One hundred thousand communicants a year. An orphanage, a school, a congregation planted in multiple countries. All of it legally abolished in a single document.
Clement made his way to Vienna.
The Apostolate of the Last Twelve Years: Vienna and the Congress That Changed Europe
He was fifty-six when he arrived in Vienna in September 1808 with no community, no church, and no legal standing. The city he had left as a young man struggling toward ordination was now one of the great cultural capitals of Europe — and was about to become the center of the political reconstruction of the entire continent after Napoleon.
He began again. He worked first as a hospital chaplain during Napoleon's siege of Vienna in 1809. Then the Archbishop gave him care of a small Italian church. In 1813 he was appointed chaplain and spiritual director to an Ursuline convent, a position he held until his death. None of these were platforms for a Redemptorist apostolate of the kind he had built in Warsaw. He had no house, no community, no legal recognition from the state.
What he had was himself. And in the Vienna of the Congress period, that was enough to change the city.
He gathered around him what became known as the Hofbauer Circle: students, writers, artists, philosophers, diplomats, and members of the German Romantic movement who found in this baker-turned-priest an intelligence and a spiritual force entirely unlike what the rationalist culture of the era offered. Friedrich Schlegel — the great Romantic critic and theorist — was in the circle, along with his wife Dorothea, the daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who had already converted and who became one of Clement's spiritual daughters. The artist Friedrich von KlinkowstrΓΆm was there. Zacharias Werner, playwright and eventual preacher. Joseph von Pilat, private secretary to Metternich. One of the young men he formed in these years, Frederic Baraga, went on to become a missionary to the Native American peoples of the Great Lakes and is himself a candidate for beatification. His friend Werner said of him: I know but three men of superhuman energy — Napoleon, Goethe, and Clement Hofbauer.
At the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, where the great powers of Europe were redrawing the map of the continent, Clement worked against the project — seriously entertained by some delegates — for a German national church independent of the papacy. The Josephinian impulse had not died with Joseph II. It had migrated into the new political arrangements being negotiated at the Congress. Clement, working through his network of friendships, through Pilat's access to Metternich, through the influence of the intellectuals he had formed, helped defeat the proposal.
The Austrian chancellor accused him of being a Roman spy — the charge being that he corresponded with his Redemptorist Superior General in Rome — and ordered him to stop preaching. Emperor Francis threatened his banishment. The Archbishop of Vienna, who understood precisely what Clement was doing for the city's Catholic life, defended him. Pope Pius VII, when the Emperor visited Rome, told the Emperor directly that Clement's work was valuable and that his establishment of the Redemptorists in the north should be permitted. The Emperor relented.
What He Could Not Undo, and What He Kept Doing Anyway
The losses of Clement's life were not small. He watched the political and military violence of the Napoleonic era destroy every foundation he had physically built: Warsaw, the houses in Germany, the houses in Switzerland, all legally suppressed. His dearest friend HΓΌbl died before the expulsion from Warsaw. He spent twelve years in Vienna unable to establish the permanent Redemptorist house that was the central goal of his priesthood.
He was, more than once, a man who had failed by every external measure — buildings closed, companions scattered, legal standing denied, preaching silenced by official order. The specific failure that marked him most was the one he carried longest: he could not get the Austrian Empire to approve the Redemptorists as a legally recognized congregation north of the Alps. He spent twelve years working toward this approval. He had petitioned, appealed, been accused, defended, petitioned again. The congregation's legal recognition was the one thing he needed for everything else to be possible.
The approval document was signed on March 15, 1820. The day he died.
He had been ill through 1819 with several overlapping diseases — the accumulated cost of decades of physical labor, poverty, cold, and the intensity of a priestly life that left no room for rest. When the news reached him, in his final hours, that the document had been signed, he said — according to those present — that now he could die in peace. He received the last sacraments. He died quietly. He was sixty-eight years old.
The Death of the Apostle of Vienna
Clement Mary Hofbauer died on March 15, 1820, at Vienna, in the Ursuline convent where he had served as chaplain for seven years. He had spent the final year of his life visibly dying — thinner, weaker, the voice that had preached five sermons a day in Warsaw now quieted — but receiving visitors until the end, hearing confessions, giving counsel to the students and intellectuals who had formed around him.
The approval he had worked for arrived on the day he died. The Redemptorists would be legally established north of the Alps almost immediately after his death — as he had predicted they would be. The Austrian Province of the Congregation, founded on the groundwork of his twelve years, became within decades the base from which the Redemptorists spread to Ireland, England, the Americas, and beyond.
When Pope Pius VII heard of his death, he said: Religion in Austria has lost its chief support.
His body rests in the church of Maria am Gestade in Vienna. His shrine is there. The church is also known as the Dominicaner Church — Gothic, narrow, medieval — in the oldest part of the inner city, exactly the kind of place a baker's son from Moravia who spent his life among the poor would have found fitting.
The Legacy: Josephinism Defeated, the Congregation Established
Clement Mary Hofbauer was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on January 29, 1888, and canonized by Pope Saint Pius X on May 20, 1909. He is co-patron of Vienna and Warsaw.
His patronage of Vienna is the legacy of the twelve years he spent there: the Romantic converts, the Congress of Vienna, the defeat of the German national church project, the spiritual revival of a capital city that had been doctrinally disoriented by decades of Josephinian rationalism. He did not build institutions in Vienna. He built people, who built the rest.
His patronage of bakers comes from his own trade: he was a baker by training and by repeated practice, returning to the oven during years when nothing else was available. He knew what it was to feed people with his hands, literally, before he fed them from the altar.
His patronage of those expelled from their apostolate belongs to his biography at its most painful point: the man who lost twenty-one years of labor in a single signed decree, who watched everything he had built in Warsaw suppressed, and who did not regard this as the end of his mission. He began again at fifty-six. He remained his vicar general north of the Alps even when there was nothing north of the Alps to govern. He prayed for the congregation until the congregation existed to pray for him.
A Prayer to Saint Clement Mary Hofbauer
Saint Clement Mary, baker of bread and priest of the abandoned, you crossed the Alps with empty hands and built what no government could permanently destroy.
Pray for those who have lost their work through the force of others, for priests who preach in hostile lands, for all who are told to stop and begin again and begin again.
Obtain for us the faith that gives away its last coins on the road and trusts that the mission will not die because the mission is not ours.
Amen.
| Born | December 26, 1751 — Tasswitz (Tasovice), Moravia (now Czech Republic) |
| Died | March 15, 1820 — Vienna, Austria; natural death from prolonged illness; received last rites |
| Feast Day | March 15 |
| Order / Vocation | Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Redemptorists, C.Ss.R.) — Vicar General north of the Alps |
| Canonized | May 20, 1909 — Pope Saint Pius X |
| Beatified | January 29, 1888 — Pope Leo XIII |
| Body | Enshrined at the church of Maria am Gestade, Vienna, Austria |
| Patron of | Vienna · Warsaw · Bakers · Those expelled from their apostolate |
| Known as | The Apostle of Vienna · The Second Founder of the Redemptorists · The Apostle of the North |
| Foundations | St. Benno's, Warsaw (1787) · Redemptorist houses in Poland, Germany, Switzerland · Orphanage and school in Warsaw (256 boys, 187 girls) · Catholic college, Vienna |
| Key relationships | Fr. Thaddeus HΓΌbl C.Ss.R. (co-founder of Redemptorists north of the Alps; d. 1807) · Zacharias Werner · Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel · Venerable Frederic Baraga (spiritual son) |
| Their words | (When a man spat beer in his face during a begging visit to a tavern): "That was for me. Now what do you have for my boys?" |
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