[1] Sailer was born at Aresing in Upper Bavaria on 17 October 1751 as the son of a poor Catholic shoemaker and his wife.

[2] His opponents, professors of Dillingen and Rossle, the principal of the school at Pfaffenhausen, succeeded in limiting Sailer's activities in 1793 and in securing his sudden dismissal in 1794.

In 1800 he was transferred along with the university to Landshut, where he taught pastoral and moral theology, pedagogics, homiletics, liturgy and catechetics.

[2] Celebrated as a teacher and a writer, Sailer was repeatedly called to other positions, was on terms of friendship with distinguished Catholics and Protestants, and was universally revered by his pupils, among whom was the Crown Prince Louis, later King of Bavaria.

By contrast, Sailer defended fundamental principles of Christianity and traditional practice, striving for a faith to be expressed in charity, for the maintenance of godliness, and for the training of a pious and intelligent clergy.

He ardently desired ecclesiastical reform, not through unauthorized agencies but by the appointed organs of the Church; and he demanded that education should aim at training both mind and will.

Sailer labored for the Christian ideal by his winning personality, by his utterances as teacher, parish priest and preacher, and by his numerous written works.

Do not expect from him any religious polemics; he abhorred them; what he really cherished was the idea of a sort of cooperation of the various Christian bodies against the negations of infidelity.

It stands outside the Akademie für Lehrerfortbildung und Personalführung, the building in which Johann Michael Sailer was professor of pastoral theology and ethics from 1784 to 1794.