Background
Pixner was born in 1921, the first of eight children, in Untermais, Meran, South Tyrol.
anthropologist archaeologist Catholic priest
Pixner was born in 1921, the first of eight children, in Untermais, Meran, South Tyrol.
He started his study of theology in 1940 in Brixen and joined the Mill Hill Missionary Fathers" Tyrolean branch in 1941. During World World War II, Pixner was sent to the Eastern Front in 1944 after refusing to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler, but he escaped from Silesia in May 1945. Pixner was ordained priest in 1946 in Brixen, immediately prior to leaving for missionary work in the Philippines, where he headed a leprosy center in Santa Barbara, Iloilo for the next eight years.
He later worked in France, Italy, and the United States, becoming a United States citizen.
Pixner spent the next twelve years organizing the construction of an affiliated abbey at Tabgha before returning to Hagia Maria Sion Abbey in 1994 and then serving as a prior. Pixner gave tours of the Holy Land to famous pilgrims such as Jimmy Carter and Helmut Kohl.
Pixner"s theories, linking archaeological sites to events and figures in the Bible, have been met with mixed acceptance by scholars. He shared Bagatti and Testa"s thesis of a Church of Zion, Jerusalem in the 3rd-4th Centuries.
Pixner also identified a site on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee as the site of Bethsaida in a 1985 article, an identification which the State of Israel made official in 1989 after excavations in 1987.