Who Was Bartholomew Holzhauser?

Bartholomew Holzhauser was a German parish priest, a reformer of the diocesan clergy, a reputed visionary, and the author of what the old French edition of his work calls, without embarrassment, the finest interpretation of the Apocalypse ever written. He was born on 24 August 1613 in Laugna, a small village in the Diocese of Augsburg in Bavaria, and he died on 20 May 1658 at Bingen on the Rhine, in his forty-fifth year, the nineteenth of his priesthood. The Catholic Church has conferred on him the title Venerable, the formal recognition that he practised the Christian virtues to a heroic degree, and his cause for beatification remains open.

His entire life was lived inside the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and its aftermath — the most destructive catastrophe Germany experienced before the twentieth century. He was five years old when it began and thirty-five when it ended. Everything he did, and everything he wrote, must be read against that background: a Catholic Germany devastated by armies, plague, and famine; a clergy demoralised and in many places scandalous; a Church that had lost half the German-speaking world to the Reformation within living memory. Holzhauser's response to that ruin was twofold. As a man of action, he founded an institute to restore the priesthood. As a contemplative, he wrote an interpretation of the Apocalypse in which the whole of Church history — including the ruin he was living through — has its appointed place in the plan of God.

Childhood and Youth

The biographical notice printed at the head of the 1857 French edition of his Interpretation of the Apocalypse, taken from an anonymous life published at Bamberg in 1799, describes his origins simply: a true servant of God, Swabian by birth, born in a humble village a few leagues from Augsburg, in August of the year of grace 1613. His father, Leonard Holzhauser, was a shoemaker; his mother was named Catherine; Bartholomew was one of eleven children of parents remembered as poor, pious, and honest.

There was no school in his hamlet, so as a boy he walked to the school of the neighbouring town of Wertingen, about a league from his father's house, and — the old biography records the detail with evident affection — he used to shorten the road with prayers and holy hymns, "which were his delight." In 1624, at the age of eleven, he began the study of Latin at Augsburg, where his poverty forced him to seek his bread from door to door, singing and begging. During his time at Augsburg he fell gravely ill in an epidemic then raging — he later publicly attributed his deliverance from the plague to the intercession of the Mother of God, for whom he retained the most intense devotion all his life. After his recovery he returned home for a time and helped his father at the cobbler's trade. He then continued his studies at Neuburg on the Danube, where he found a better situation under the protection of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, and completed his education at the university town of Ingolstadt, taking the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1636 and pursuing theology, in which he became a licentiate. His teachers, the sources agree, were unanimous in praising his talent, his piety, and his modesty.

The old life insists that from his earliest years he was favoured with heavenly visions, and it draws a portrait of the student he became: mortified, chaste, humble, gentle, patient; ardent in charity toward the poor although poor himself; careless of danger in bringing help to the victims of the war and the scourges that followed it; teaching Christian doctrine to the ignorant, consoling the afflicted, correcting abuses; and, when he was insulted for it by the wicked, "full of joy at having been found worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus Christ."

Priesthood

Holzhauser was ordained a priest in 1639 in the episcopal city of Eichstätt, and celebrated his first Mass at Ingolstadt on Pentecost, in the chapel of Our Lady of Victory — the same chapel where, as a student, he had so often offered his heart to God. He immediately threw himself into the ministry of the confessional, with such success that penitents crowded to him in great numbers.

It was precisely this success that revealed to him the problem that would define his life's work. One holy priest could not renew a devastated Church. Fearing, in the words of the old biography, "to exhaust his strength in the cultivation of the Lord's vineyard," he sought to associate with himself zealous collaborators capable of continuing and propagating the work. Already in 1640, within a year of his ordination, he had persuaded three parish priests senior to himself to adopt a common rule of life with him.

The Bartholomites: Restoring the Priesthood

What grew from that beginning was the Institutum clericorum saecularium in communi viventium — the Institute of Secular Clergy Living in Community — whose members came to be known, after their founder, as the Bartholomites, and in Germany as the "United Brethren." The idea was as simple as it was radical for its time. The disasters of the Thirty Years' War had left faith lukewarm and discipline relaxed, among the clergy as much as the laity. Holzhauser's remedy was not a new religious order but a renewal of the diocesan priesthood itself: secular priests who, without leaving their dioceses or their bishops, would live an apostolic common life, hold their funds in common, keep no female servants in their houses, follow a fixed rule of daily prayer, and bind themselves not by religious vows but by a simple promise of obedience confirmed by oath. The best of them were to be placed as teachers in seminaries, so that a new generation of exemplary priests would be formed, who would in turn join and extend the community.

The foundations came quickly. After an unsuccessful first attempt in the Diocese of Eichstätt, Holzhauser set out on foot for Salzburg — "without a bag, with little money," says the old life, gathering a fourth companion on the road — and there received a warm welcome from the ecclesiastical authorities. He obtained a canonry at Tittmoning, a town of the Archdiocese of Salzburg near the Bavarian border, where he was given charge of souls and acquired a large house for himself and his companions: the very house, the biography notes, that he had seen in a dream while still at Ingolstadt. His first colleagues included priests of noted piety from the Ingolstadt region, and the number of his companions grew from day to day.

On the feast of the Purification of Our Lady in 1642 he took charge of the parish and deanery of St. Johann in the Leukental, a Tyrolean valley on the road between Innsbruck and Salzburg, where he laboured for ten years — catechising children and adults, visiting the schools, restoring ecclesiastical discipline, and relieving the poor with such devotion during the Tyrolean famine of about 1649 that, in the words of the old biography, "his name is still blessed in those mountains." Meanwhile the institutional work advanced: the first seminary of the institute was founded at Salzburg in 1643 and later transferred, for serious reasons, to Ingolstadt in 1649; houses were established at Augsburg, Regensburg, and elsewhere, with the favour of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, who wrote in 1646 that it had "pleased the divine goodness to raise up priests whose sole aim is to procure for the Church men who, living according to the rules of the sacred canons and of ecclesiastical discipline, devote themselves entirely and with a pure heart to the priestly functions."

The Church's formal judgment on the institute came after the founder's death, and it is worth recording for what it says about the man. In 1670 the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars declared: "This pious and holy institution has no need of approbation, since it prescribes nothing other than what was practised by the clergy of the primitive Church." Pope Innocent XI formally approved the constitutions of the institute on 17 August 1684. Holzhauser's Constitutiones et exercitia spiritualia, printed at Cologne, Würzburg, Rome, and Mainz across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were used in many seminaries, and — a detail often overlooked — helped spread primary education among the common people, since Holzhauser instructed his priests to establish schools everywhere in which the young would be taught reading, writing, and the rudiments of religion. The Bartholomites spread well beyond Germany before dying out in the upheavals of the early nineteenth century, and the epitaph on their founder's tomb fixes his achievement in a single phrase: restorer, in upper Germany, of the common life of the secular clergy.

Bingen, and a King of England

In 1651 the institute founded a seminary at Würzburg, and at the invitation of the Elector-Archbishop of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn — who later admitted him to his intimate circle — Holzhauser became parish priest and dean at Bingen on the Rhine, the town already famous as the home of St. Hildegard five centuries earlier. There he opened Latin schools for the benefit of the town and the surrounding country, and there he spent his final years.

It was at Bingen that the most striking single episode of his life took place, and the 1799 biography recounts it in detail. Charles II, the exiled King of England, preparing to return to his country, had heard of Holzhauser's reputation — he "had predicted astonishing things about England" — and, descending the Rhine, desired to see him. The king summoned the priest and conversed with him for an hour, to hear from his own mouth what he foretold of his kingdom and his reign. Holzhauser had predicted that the kingdom would be reduced to the greatest miseries, that the king himself would not be spared, but that after the return of peace the English, converted to the Roman Catholic faith, would do more for the Church than they had done after their first conversion. The biography adds that already in 1635 — as a young student, decades before the event — Holzhauser had written: Et intellexi juge sacrificium centum et viginti annis ablatum esse: "And I understood that the perpetual sacrifice would be taken away for a hundred and twenty years." The old biographer, writing in 1799, saw this fulfilled in the span between the penal legislation of 1658 and the first Catholic Relief Act of 1778. Nothing, the life adds, lay closer to Holzhauser's heart than the conversion of England; he longed to go there himself, despising every danger to his life, and was prevented only by the duties of his parish and his schools.

Readers may weigh such reports as they judge best. This site records them because they are part of the historical testimony about the man, faithfully transmitted; the Church herself, in leaving his cause open, has passed no definitive judgment on his private revelations, and neither do we.

The Interpretation of the Apocalypse

Holzhauser wrote his Interpretation of the Apocalypse in Latin in the Tyrol, and completed the work as we have it in 1657, one year before his death — in a real sense, his testament. The circumstances of its composition are described consistently by the early sources: he wrote it "amid the greatest trials, plunged in meditation, fasting and prayer," passing entire days in fasting, separated from all human company. He himself confessed that in writing it he "was like a child whose hand is guided in order to make him write."

The work interprets the Apocalypse of St. John as the prophetic history of the Catholic Church from Christ to the consummation of the ages, divided into seven ages or epochs, each corresponding to one of the seven churches of Asia, to one of the days of creation, to one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and to one of the great periods of the Old Testament. In Holzhauser's schema the age of Ephesus runs from Christ to Nero; Smyrna, the age of the martyrs, from Nero to Constantine; Pergamum from Constantine to Charlemagne; Thyatira from Charlemagne to Charles V; Sardes — the fifth age, the age of purgation, in which Holzhauser located his own time — from Charles V until the Great Monarch; Philadelphia, the age of consolation under a holy pope and a great Christian ruler; and Laodicea, the final age of desolation under Antichrist. The full schema, and Holzhauser's verse-by-verse working of it, is the substance of this website, presented chapter by chapter.

The most famous fact about the commentary is that it is unfinished. Holzhauser broke off at the fourth verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Apocalypse. When his priests asked him why, he answered with complete simplicity that he no longer felt himself animated by the same spirit and could not continue — and he added that someone who came after him would take up his work and crown it. The 1857 French editor remarks that God, for particular reasons, apparently willed to reserve the rest of His secrets for another epoch.

Death and Burial

While occupied with his parish, his schools, and the fatherly care of his institutes, Holzhauser was seized by a mortal fever. Surrounded by his own, who wept and prayed, he raised his eyes to heaven and died on 20 May 1658, in the forty-fifth year of his life, the nineteenth of his priesthood, eighteen years after the establishment of his institute. He was buried in the parish church of Bingen before the altar of the Holy Cross, under an epitaph that reads: Venerabilis vir Dei servus Bartholomaeus Holzhauser, SS. Theologiae Licentiatus, Ecclesiae Bingensis pastor et decanus, Vitae Clericorum saecularium in communi viventium in superiore Germania restitutor, obiit anno 1658, die Maii 20 — "The venerable man, servant of God, Bartholomew Holzhauser, Licentiate of Sacred Theology, pastor and dean of the church of Bingen, restorer in upper Germany of the common life of the secular clergy, died in the year 1658, on the 20th day of May."

On the second centenary of his death, in 1858, a celebration was held at Bingen in the presence of the Bishop of Mainz, and his grave was identified anew; a monument was erected over it in the parish church in 1880. His bust stands among the honoured figures of Bavaria in the Ruhmeshalle at Munich. The Church has declared him Venerable — the sources place the formal advancement of his cause in the later nineteenth century, under Leo XIII — and his cause for beatification remains open to this day.

His Reputation and the Fortunes of His Book

The judgment of those who knew his work has been remarkably constant. The Petits Bollandistes, the great nineteenth-century French collection of the lives of the saints, wrote in its seventh edition (1878) that Holzhauser left "an Interpretation of the Apocalypse of Saint John, which goes only as far as the fifth verse of the fifteenth chapter — an astonishing work, it is said, which offers so admirable a concordance of times and events that the other commentaries on this sacred book are, by comparison, mere child's play." An old manuscript life of Holzhauser, cited in the 1857 preface, said the same thing more bluntly: compared with this genius, all the other commentators on the Apocalypse, however learned, seemed like children. In the nineteenth century the Munich professor Daniel Bonifacius von Haneberg — later a bishop — judged Holzhauser's the best interpretation of the Apocalypse that had ever appeared.

The book itself had a quiet history. Written in 1657, it circulated and was printed in Latin; old copies are found in libraries across Germany and Europe. The learned Mechitarist fathers published a new Latin edition at Vienna in 1850. In the 1850s a Swiss priest, Canon de Wuilleret — who had himself suffered in the persecution of Catholic Switzerland in the Sonderbund crisis of 1847 — translated the work into French and published it at Paris (Vivès, second edition, 1857), adding a continuation of his own for the chapters Holzhauser left uninterpreted. Wuilleret's continuation, whatever its devotional merits, is not Holzhauser, and this website does not present it as such. When the 1857 edition appeared, contemporaries largely failed to understand a text that spoke of devastation for the Church at the very moment Catholic missions were expanding across the globe; the book was forgotten, surviving copies became rare, and it was left to later generations to rediscover it.

A Note on This Biography and Its Sources

The narrative above rests principally on the biographical notice printed at the head of the 1857 French edition of the Interpretation of the Apocalypse — an abridgement of an anonymous life of Holzhauser published at Bamberg in 1799 — supplemented and cross-checked against the standard reference accounts of his life, notably the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910). Where the French edition garbles German place names (Longnau for Laugna, Verding for Wertingen, Léogénie for the Leukental, Wurabourg for Würzburg), the correct forms have been restored. Reports of visions, prophecies, and answered prayers are given as the early sources give them, with attribution; they are part of the historical record of how Holzhauser was seen by those nearest to him in time, and the reader is free — as the Church is free — to weigh them. Everything on this site is offered in the spirit of the 1857 translator's own closing words, which we make our own: in filial submission to the judgment of the holy Roman Church in everything she may judge concerning this work.