Saint Conrad of Parzham

He was born Johann Birndorfer on December 22, 1818. ¹⁴ Franciscan Media places his parents, Bartholomew and Gertrude Birndorfer, near Parzham in Bavaria, in a region still recovering from the Napoleonic wars. ¹ The Capuchin General Curia says he was born in Parzham itself, in Lower Bavaria, and the life published by the Australian Capuchins on CapDox gives the farm as the Venushof and his mother as Gertrud Nieder-Mayerinn of Kindlbach, and makes him the eleventh of twelve children. ⁴⁵

He was orphaned at sixteen. ⁴ CapDox, which follows the Capuchin historian Costanzo Cargnoni, admits that "very little however is known about his life when he was a secular and nearly nothing about his childhood", and quotes his earliest biographer, Wolfgang Beyer: "He never spoke about himself." ⁴ What the neighbors remembered was prayer. He went to missions, processions and pilgrimages, walked a long way to Mass, and prayed in the fields with the rake in his hand; the wife of a Birndorfer blacksmith said that "the young Birndorfer was not suited to make a farmer. He had become nothing other than prayer, penance and alms." ⁴

Franciscan Media remembers him as a young man who loved solitary prayer and made peace between people. ¹ At nineteen, CapDox says, he tried without success to study at the Benedictine school at Metten, and in 1841 he professed the rule of the Franciscan Third Order. ⁴

Benedict XVI, speaking at Altötting in 2006, said that he "renounced a great inheritance because he wanted to follow Jesus Christ unreservedly and to be completely with him." ² The General Curia dates his arrival to 1849, when he knocked on the door of the Capuchin friary at Altötting and was received as a postulant; CapDox says he was thirty-one. ⁴⁵ In 1851 he began his novitiate at Laufen. ⁴⁵

It began badly. Put to work helping the gardeners, he caught a cold within a month that turned into acute bronchitis, and CapDox dates from it the bronchial asthma that troubled him for the rest of his life. ⁴ Before his profession he wrote out eleven resolutions, which CapDox quotes. The first was "to remain continually in the presence of God"; another was "to ask myself, whenever I have to encounter crosses of suffering, 'Conrad, why have you come here?'"; another, "to bear up patiently with the defects and weaknesses of others". ⁴ The last was to cultivate a deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin and to imitate her virtues. ⁴⁵

He made his profession on October 4, 1852, according to the General Curia and the body of CapDox's account, and Franciscan Media and Vatican News also give 1852. ¹³⁴⁵ CapDox's opening summary says 1842, which would put his profession before he had entered the order, and the later date is the one the other sources agree on. ⁴

He was sent straight back to Altötting as porter of the friary of St. Anne, which served one of the most popular Marian shrines in Bavaria. ¹⁴⁵ He kept the door for the rest of his life: forty-one years, by Franciscan Media's count, more than forty by Vatican News's. ¹³ Some of the friars were at first jealous that so young a brother held so important a post, Franciscan Media says, until his patience won them over. ¹

The porter dealt with everybody. He obtained many of the friary's supplies, and he provided for the poor who came to the door. ¹ CapDox describes him hurrying to the bell, smiling, giving "unstintingly" and without judgment, and says that "economic laws were unknown to him." ⁴ When the cook saw his ladle visiting every pot, he would complain, "Put the lids on. Otherwise he will take everything," and Conrad answered, "Everything given to the poor returns again abundantly." ⁴ Franciscan Media adds that he had a particular rapport with the children of the town and promoted the Seraphic Work of Charity, which helped neglected children. ¹

Not every visitor was easy. Benedict XVI said people knocked "at all hours - sometimes mischievously, in order to provoke him, at other times loudly and impatiently." ² Franciscan Media tells of a priest, Father Vincent, who climbed the bell tower for quiet to prepare a sermon, and was tracked down there by Conrad because someone wanted to go to confession to him and nobody else. ¹ He spoke little. CapDox says his usual phrases were "In Gottes Namen" and "Wie der liebe Gott es will", in the name of God and as the good God wills. ⁴

His prayer was fitted around the door. Franciscan Media says he spent hours before the Blessed Sacrament and regularly asked the Virgin Mary to intercede for him and for the people he prayed for. ¹ CapDox describes a tiny room under a staircase from which he could look through to the altar and see the tabernacle, and says he was always first to the midnight office and served the first Mass in the shrine's chapel of grace every day. ⁴ Benedict XVI said that "from his cell he could always look at the tabernacle and thus always 'stay with Christ'", and that from this contemplation he learned "the boundless goodness" with which he treated the people at the door. ²

He read the Imitation of Christ and the meditations on the Passion of his Capuchin confrere Martin von Cochem, but CapDox gives the saying he was known for: "The Cross is my only book. One look at the Cross teaches me how I should conduct myself for every occasion." ⁴ In a letter of October 3, 1873, he wrote that "a soul that speaks a lot will never achieve a truly interior life." ⁴

CapDox also quotes a longer passage in which he described his own life: "My tenor of life consists above all in loving and suffering in contemplation, and to adore and contemplate and admire that nameless love for us poor creatures." ⁴ It ends in a worry rather than a boast: "Very often this is my one worry, that I love Him so little." ⁴

In his last years, CapDox says, he was short and badly stooped, almost bald, with a flowing white beard, which is how he is usually painted, holding a cross or giving to the poor. ⁴ He died at Altötting on April 21, 1894. ⁴⁵ His friary of St. Anne is now called St. Konrad's. ⁴

His cause moved quickly. The documents could only be sent to Rome at the end of 1919, because of the war; Pius XI beatified him on June 15, 1930, and canonized him on May 20, 1934. ⁴⁵ CapDox calls him the second German saint after the Reformation, after Fidelis of Sigmaringen. ⁴ In 2018 the Capuchins marked the bicentenary of his birth at Altötting, where the Bishop of Passau consecrated a new altar in the church dedicated to him, and the friars went on pilgrimage to the house in Parzham where he was born. ⁵

CapDox lists him as co-patron of the Capuchin provinces of Bavaria and of Hungary, and patron of the Capuchin province of Mid-America, the Diocese of Passau in Germany, the Seraphic Work of Charity and the Catholic youth of Würzburg. ⁴ None of these is a patronage of a kind of person or need, so no patronage tag is given here.

Saint Conrad's feast is April 21, the day he died. ¹³⁴ Franciscan Media calls it his liturgical feast, and Vatican News lists him on that day as "St. Conrad of Parzham, Capuchin". ¹³ In 2018 the Capuchins kept the day at Altötting with particular solemnity, because it fell on the bicentenary of his birth. ⁵

He did one job for about forty years, and it was a job of interruptions. ¹³ The bell rang at all hours, and Benedict XVI is frank that some of the people ringing it were trying to provoke him. ² The sources do not describe a man who found a way to be left in peace; they describe one who kept going to the door.

He prayed in the gaps. A little room with a view of the tabernacle, the first Mass of the day, the midnight office: the sources assemble his prayer out of the minutes the door left him. ²⁴ Benedict XVI read his life as an example of what the Apostles were called to, to stay with Christ and to be sent to others, and found both in one porter's lodge. ²

His resolutions are small and concrete: say no unkind word, bear with the defects of others, keep silence, pass up the dishes you like best. ⁴ The question he set himself for hard days, "Conrad, why have you come here?", is one he expected to need, and he wrote it in a novitiate that had already left him with the asthma he carried for the rest of his life. ⁴

Benedict XVI closed his homily at Altötting by asking Saint Conrad to help the Church keep its gaze on the Lord "in order to bring God's love to the men and women of our time." ² For Conrad, that was the person at the door.