Portrait of Bl. Engelmar Unzeitig

Blessed · Feast March 2 · 1911–1945

Bl. Engelmar Unzeitig

Hubert Unzeitig was born in 1911 at Greifendorf, a German-speaking village in what is now the Czech Republic, the youngest of six children of a small farmer. His father died as a prisoner of war in Russia in 1916.

The story

Hubert Unzeitig was born in 1911 at Greifendorf, a German-speaking village in what is now the Czech Republic, the youngest of six children of a small farmer. His father died as a prisoner of war in Russia in 1916.

He joined the Mariannhill Missionaries, took the name Engelmar, and was ordained a priest in 1939. In 1940 he was put in charge of the parish of Glöckelberg in the Bohemian Forest, a poor and remote place.

On April 21, 1941, the Gestapo arrested him, and he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp. There he kept ministering to other prisoners. When typhus broke out in the camp in late 1944, he volunteered to nurse the sick. He caught the disease and died on March 2, 1945. He was beatified in Würzburg in 2016 as a martyr.

Blessed, not yet a saint

Engelmar Unzeitig was beatified in 2016.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.

Sources

Sources & notes

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