Saint Clement Mary Hofbauer

Johannes Hofbauer was born on December 26, 1751, in Tasswitz, in Moravia (today Tasovice, Czech Republic), the ninth of twelve children of a butcher's family. Too poor to study for the priesthood, he trained as a baker and lived for a time as a hermit, while working to pay for his studies in Vienna. In 1784 in Rome he and his friend Thaddeus Hübl joined the Redemptorists, founded by Saint Alphonsus Liguori, taking the name Clement Mary.

Sent north of the Alps, he worked for twenty years at Saint Benno's Church in Warsaw, where he and his companions offered Masses, sermons and catechism all day long and cared for orphans and the poor. When Napoleon suppressed the community in 1808, Clement settled in Vienna. There, as chaplain to the Ursulines and confessor, he influenced students, artists and leaders and helped revive Catholic life. He died in Vienna on March 15, 1820, and was canonized in 1909.

He is co-patron of Vienna, where his tomb in the church of Maria am Gestade draws pilgrims. Bakers in Austria and Poland honor him as one of their own, and Redemptorist parishes worldwide, including in Latin America, celebrate his feast.