Homestead Priest... YouTube Star?

A surprising viral video featuring our favorite hiking hermit

Back in May, we wrote an article titled “Save Our Pilgrim Paths,” which mentioned a Roman Catholic priest from Austria named Fr. Johannes Maria Schwarz. We wrote:

In 2018, Catholic priest Fr. Johannes Schwarz hiked what he dubbed the “Via Alpina Sacra,” a nearly 3000 mile route through the Alps from Slovenia to France that he designed in order to visit over 220 Catholic shrines, churches, and monasteries across Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and France. That hike is the length of the American Pacific Crest Trail but with twice the vertical gain. We haven’t seen anyone else complete that for pilgrimage purposes but it sounds like a tradition waiting to be born!

Here is Fr. Schwarz’s own YouTube video documenting his hike.

Given that background, we were delighted a few days ago to see Fr. Schwarz profiled in a 20 minute video on the YouTube channel of Kirsten Dirksen, a Harvard-educated economist turned professional YouTuber. Her channel documents minimalist styles of living and restoring buildings and land, and has over 1.6 million subscribers. Her most popular videos have over 10 million views apiece.

Her video profiling Fr. Schwarz is called “Young Priest Turns Forsaken Farm into Paradise Homestead,” and it already has 174,000 259,000 views after only four six days online!

The video provides a part of Fr. Schwarz’s backstory that we were not aware of. Namely, his bishop has given him permission to live as a hermit in the Italian Alps for a period of time.

To do that, he bought an abandoned hut on several acres of land, high on a mountain (altitude 3900 feet/1200 meters) overlooking Torre Pellice, Piedmont, Italy, and has spent the last three years fixing up the property and planting “micro-climate” gardens, as well as building and decorating a chapel in his tiny home.

He lives there alone, only going into town every few weeks to buy supplies, but from his room he runs a Catholic multimedia evangelization project called Kathmedia.de.

He calls the restored farmhouse “Eremo San Onofrio” [St. Onofrio’s Hermitage]:

The hermitage is located in the Italian Alps at the far northwest part of the country, near the French border:

The YouTube video follows Fr. Schwarz around his property as he shows Kirsten and her family the homemade chapel, complete with an astounding altarpiece Fr. Schwarz made and painted by hand.

Before:

After:

It also showcased his gardening skills: he turned the steep south-facing hillside in front of his home into a terraced landscape where he grows multiple types of vegetables. In the video he explains that the stone terraces - that he built entirely by hand - warm up the surrounding earth and thus create a microclimate where fruit like strawberries, figs, and tomatoes survive at a much higher altitude than they would otherwise.

Fr. Schwarz is continuing in the tradition of early monastics like the Irish monks who evangelized post-Roman Europe in the Dark Ages. It’s great to see this ancient way of living reaching the world via the amazing technology of YouTube. San Onofrio, pray for us!

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