Ignaz Franz

Ignaz Franz was a Silesian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, hymnal editor, and hymn writer born in Protzau in 1719. He studied at Glatz and Breslau and was ordained in 1742. His ministry included service as a chaplain and vicar at Gross-Glogau, appointment as archpriest at Schlawa in 1753, and work from 1766 in the apostolic vicariate at Breslau, where he served in theological and administrative responsibilities. He died in Breslau in 1790.

Franz worked during a period when Catholic reformers were expanding German-language congregational song. He compiled devotional and doctrinal collections and wrote texts designed to communicate Christian teaching in singable form. The historically critical Liederlexikon identifies the first publication of his twelve-stanza German paraphrase of the Te Deum in Die christlich-katholische Lehre in Liedern in 1768. He later produced a substantially revised version for an expanded Catholic hymnal in 1778, but the earlier form became the enduring one.

That German paraphrase is the source behind Holy God, We Praise Thy Name. Franz did not write the familiar melody, whose composer remains anonymous; it first appeared with the text in a Vienna Catholic hymnal in 1776. His achievement was to reshape the ancient Latin canticle into a metrical German hymn that could pass from Catholic worship into a much wider ecumenical repertoire.