Assistant priest in the parish of Grottkau, suspended *a divinis* in 1843 for an anti-Roman article, he refused to submit and appealed to the clergy of Germany, urging them to break with the hierarchy, with Rome, with clerical celibacy, and with the Latin liturgy, in order to form a national German Church based on synodal principles. After being imprudently degraded by his bishop, R. founded in January 1845 the German-Catholic community in Breslau, to which some 100 other communities soon adhered, drawn into schism by his agitatorial skill. The *Confessio fidei* which R. gave to the Breslau community was rationalistic in tone, in full opposition to the teaching of the Church.
At the “Council” of Leipzig (22 March 1845) the movement begun by R. merged with that promoted shortly before in the parish of Scheidemühl by J. Czerski; in the fusion the rationalist direction of R. prevailed over the more conservative approach of Czerski. In the following years, during his propaganda tours through Germany, R. was hailed as the new reformer by freethinkers, nationalists, and liberal Protestants, while he was received with reserve by various governments and conservative Protestants. The new “reformer” lacked any genuine religious content, and this soon led to a rupture with Czerski’s followers, not even remedied at the “Council” of Berlin in 1847.
During the upheavals of 1848 R. and his adherents acted in a radical sense, and in the reaction of 1849 R. had to go into exile in England. Returning to Germany in 1861, in 1863 he founded at Frankfurt am Main the *Religiöser Reformverein* with a programme in tune with freethought and anticlericalism.