The Apparition of Vierzehnheiligen

In the summer of 1445 Hermann Leicht, a fourteen-year-old shepherd boy from the duchy of Coburg, was tending the sheep of the Cistercian abbey of Langheim on the Frankenhöhe opposite Banz. On 24 September, as he searched in the wheat field for a stray lamb, he suddenly saw in the grass a weeping child. He bent down. The child vanished. Hermann ran in fright back to the stable.

Four weeks later, on 28 October, on the same spot, he saw the child again. This time it was not alone: round the child stood fourteen young people in white robes, in a half circle. The child said: «We are the fourteen Helpers. Build us a chapel here, and we shall be your helpers in every need.» Hermann hurried to the abbot of Langheim. The abbot doubted. Hermann went back consoled to his sheep.

The third apparition came on 1 January 1446. The child showed Hermann a round circle in the grass, the size of a cradle, and said: «Here comes the altar.» The fourth and last came on 17 May 1446. This time two sick pilgrims who had heard of it through Hermann were healed on the spot — a lame man from Coburg and a blind man from Bamberg. The abbot of Langheim could no longer doubt.

On 28 May 1446 Abbot Friedrich Reuter blessed the place. A wooden chapel was built there in 1448, and a first stone church in 1525. The pilgrimage grew: by 1700 there were 100,000 pilgrims a year. The place was called Vierzehnheiligen — the fourteen saints.

In 1741 the Bishop of Bamberg, Friedrich Karl von Schönborn, commissioned the architect Balthasar Neumann to build a basilica fit to honour the pilgrimage. Neumann designed a rococo masterpiece with a Gnadenaltar — an oval altar with the fourteen Helpers in images — on the very spot where Hermann had seen the child. Construction lasted from 1743 to 1772.

The basilica still stands. Hermann Leicht died in 1465 as a lay brother of Langheim. His grave is in the basilica. The pilgrimage has never been interrupted since 1446. In 2026 still 700,000 pilgrims a year come to the Frankenhöhe, to ask the fourteen Helpers for aid against plague, war, loneliness and all the other troubles that a person finds he cannot bear alone. The abbot of Langheim who first doubted — Abbot Friedrich Reuter — was buried in 1457 beneath the Gnadenaltar, with the words: «Here rests he who believed last.»