Grüssau Abbey

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The Abbey Grüssau is a Founded in 1947, the Abbey of Beuron Congregation . The abbey initially consisted of Benedictine monks who were expelled from the Grüssau monastery in Silesia after the Second World War . It was based in the former knight's monastery in Bad Wimpfen before the seat was moved to the Neuburg Abbey near Heidelberg by 2004 due to the decline in membership .

history

The German Benedictine monks of the Emmaus monastery in Prague had to leave Prague after the First World War and settled in the former Cistercian monastery Grüssau in Silesia in 1919 . This monastery was closed during World War II . After the end of the war, the monastery was initially returned, but the monks were also expelled from Silesia in May 1946. Larger groups of monks first came to the Abbey Gerleve , the Neresheim Abbey , the Abbey Maria Laach and the Neuburg Abbey .

Since a large part of the expelled Silesians had come to Northern Germany, the Benedictines first looked there for a suitable location to found a new monastery. After these plans failed, the convention meeting in Neuburg decided on July 1, 1947 to repopulate the knight's monastery in Bad Wimpfen , which had been abandoned since 1803 and which the Hessian state government had offered as the owner of the property on May 12, 1947. The most striking building of the knight's monastery is the collegiate church of St. Peter . Residential buildings did not yet exist in 1947 and had to be provisionally built by the first monks who arrived on August 1, 1947. The western part of the Gothic cloister of the collegiate church, the former abbey store, was converted into a residential building. In 1949 the monks leased a nearby farm and later additional farm buildings were built near the monastery building.

View into the cloister of the collegiate church St. Peter in Bad Wimpfen

In the early 1950s, the monks managed to get back three of the seven bells that had been cast in 1935 by Petit and Edelbrock for the Grüssau monastery and that had been transported to Hamburg in 1941 to be melted down. However, the bells were too big for the bell towers in Wimpfen, so that in 1952 they were sold to the Catholic parish church of St. Cäcilia in Mosbach , where the bells were also lost due to being melted down for war purposes.

The pastoral duties of the abbey in the early days included not only regional work on site, but also pastoral trips to various areas of Germany, especially to northern Germany, where pastoral care was provided among the Silesian expellees. The Grüssauer Rundbrief and the participation of Grüssau Fathers in the Chapel Carriage Mission kept contact with the scattered believers. The regional work included pastoral tasks in the Neckarsulm hospital as well as Sunday and confessional assistants in various parishes in the area. In the 1960s, after the retirement of the former Catholic pastor, the Catholic pastoral care in Bad Wimpfen was added. The meetings of the Silesian youth of the Eichendorff guilds as well as the annual meetings of the Association of Catholic Nobles of Silesia continued in Wimpfen .

In 1961 the monastery was enlarged by donating a baroque abbey house on the neighboring Lindenplatz. In 1963/64 new buildings for the monastery library, sacristy, lecture hall and guest house were built. The collegiate church in Bad Wimpfen, which belongs to the diocese of Mainz , was extensively renovated in 1964 and 1969. Especially after this renovation, in addition to the purely pastoral tasks of the abbey, there were also to a certain extent tasks of tourism in the church, which was visited by numerous visitors out of art-historical interest.

The first abbot in Wimpfen was Albert Schmitt (1894–1970). He was succeeded in 1969 by Abbot Laurentius Hoheisel (1923-2008), who resigned in 1997. Since independence was no longer legally possible due to insufficient membership, the convent has been headed by the abbot of Neuburg Abbey near Heidelberg since 2001 . An affiliation took place in January 2004, which was initially limited to five years. In October 2006 the community only consisted of four monks. Former Abbot Laurentius Hoheisel went to a nursing home for the elderly, Father Odo was a spiritual director with the Benedictine nuns in Kellenried, Father Paulus was no longer there and Brother Michael moved to the Neuburg Abbey. So there was no longer any Benedictine monk on site. The seat of the Grüssau Abbey was formally moved to Heidelberg, as Abbot Franziskus Heereman is also the abbot of Neuburg Abbey.

The community of secular clerics and laypeople that remained in Bad Wimpfen in the rooms of the knight's monastery operated an education and meeting center under the name of Bad Wimpfen Monastery until the end of 2007 . On January 1, 2008, the Maltese took over the sponsorship in order to continue the Bad Wimpfen monastery as a spiritual center. The Bad Wimpfen Monastery is currently (2012) headed by the theologian Ingrid Orlowski. Today the district office of the Malteser Aid Service and a stationary youth welfare facility are located on the monastery grounds.

literature

  • Brigitte Lob: Albert Schmitt OSB - Abbot in Grüssau and Wimpfen. His ecclesiastical action and work in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich . Böhlau, Cologne 2000, ISBN 978-3412042004
  • Ambrosius Rose: Grüssau Monastery. Theiss, Stuttgart and Aalen 1974, ISBN 3-8062-0126-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ St. Cäcilia in Mosbach. 1935-1985. Church life in the past and present. Laub, Elztal-Dallau 1985, ISBN 3-88260-032-2 , pp. 87/88 and 95.
  2. ↑ Herbert Kaletta: A new spiritual center . In: Heilbronn voice . July 4, 2009 ( from Stimme.de [accessed on August 30, 2009]).

Coordinates: 49 ° 13 '54 "  N , 9 ° 10' 39"  E