HOLWECK, FRIEDRICH GEORG. – Prelate, hagiographer, and liturgist, born at Weisloch in Baden on 29 Dec. 1856, died at St. Louis on 15 Feb. 1927. He went to the United States in 1876; ordained a priest in 1880, he devoted himself to pastoral ministry, became vicar general of the diocese in 1926, and was a professor at the Jesuit University. In the immediate postwar period after 1918, he organized the dispatch of relief supplies to the populations affected by the war in Germany.
For twenty years he was director of the Pastoral-Blatt; one of the founders and an energetic contributor to the St. Louis Historical Review; he also contributed to the Cath. Enc. He is known above all, however, for two highly esteemed works on liturgy and hagiography: Fasti Mariani sive Calendarium Festorum S. Mariae Virginis Deiparae (Freiburg im Breisgau 1892), a liturgical study of the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary, reworked “ex novo” in the Calendarium Liturgicum Festorum Dei et Dei Matris Mariae (Philadelphia 1925). This is a very rich, though not complete, list of liturgical feasts in honor of God, the Virgin, St. Joseph, and their relatives, celebrated in the Catholic Church and in the separated Churches, arranged month by month according to their respective dates and accompanied by brief historical notices, with particular reference to the place where they are celebrated and to the rite of the feast (cf. review by J. Simon, in Analecta Bollandiana, 45 [1927], pp. 363–64); A biographical dictionary of the saints with a general introduction on logology (St. Louis 1924). Despite the defects that can easily be found in works of this kind, composed in a single effort by one person, it is the best and most complete dictionary of the saints still in existence. The author worked on it for many years, undertaking several journeys to Europe (1900, 1909, 1912, 1921, also for his Calendarium) for research; for many months he examined the archives of the S. Congregation of Rites, gathering there, with the assistance of the archivist Msgr. B. Virili, a rich and unpublished body of data concerning the dissemination of the feasts of local saints, together with the corresponding liturgical rite of the feast. It includes the saints of the Catholic Church and of the separated Churches (the latter preceded by an asterisk); saints bearing the same name are arranged according to the date of their feasts; the blessed follow the saints. Each saint has a brief historical notice, generally composed with care and precision and based on works of sound criticism, indicated at the beginning of the volume. At times, however, H. allowed himself to be influenced by compilations of little value and fell into unpleasant errors (cf. review by J. Simon, in Analecta Bollandiana, 44 [1926], pp. 380–83).