Apollonia Radermecher

Apollonia Radermecher

Apollonia Radermecher (born September 9, 1571 in Aachen ; † December 31, 1626 there ) was a German religious woman and founder of the Elisabethinnenorden .

Live and act

Radermecher was the daughter of the city official Peter Radermecher and his wife Christine Esch. She grew up in a strictly Catholic family at the height of the Aachen religious unrest; two brothers became priests and one uncle was a preacher at the Viennese imperial court. When the Protestant councilors temporarily had a majority in the Aachen city council at the beginning of the 17th century, the father lost his position in the town hall and Apollonia Radermecher moved to the Dutch city of 's-Hertogenbosch for the next eleven years . With the considerable fortune from the estate of her father, who was also a wealthy merchant, she bought a house there, where she began her charitable work together with other women.

Poor hospital "Gasthaus"

After the Catholics had again received the council majority in Aachen in the following years, Radermecher accepted a call from the city of Aachen in 1622, through the mediation of the Jesuit community of Aachen, the office of "innkeeper" at the city's poor hospital "Gasthaus", the first founded in 1336 "Elisabeth-Hospital" Aachen to take over. This was once located on Münsterplatz right next to the Aachen Cathedral , where the old building of the Sparkasse Aachen headquarters is today, and where there were considerable grievances at the time. Radermecher took up this office on August 13, 1622 and founded the religious order of the "Hospital Sisters of St. Elisabeth of the Third Order of St. Francis", or the "Elisabethinnen" for short. Her first big task was to use her wealth to remedy the existing grievances as quickly as possible and to cope with the onslaught of the Aachen Shrine Tour that took place in the same year , during which serious illnesses occurred among the pilgrims again and again.

Motherhouse of the Elisabethinnen Aachen since 1937

Their main problem, however, was the plague brought in by the pilgrims , from which large parts of the population as well as several sisters and Radermecher themselves became seriously ill. Already badly marked by the disease, she took her religious vows on May 5, 1626 and died on December 31, 1626 of the consequences of the plague. Her bones have been buried since August 13, 1953 in the crypt of the monastery church of the mother house of the Elisabethinnen, newly built in 1937, on Preusweg in Aachen. In the 1950s, a beatification was sought, which has so far been unsuccessful.

The Elizabethine Order founded by Radermecher expanded rapidly and is now active with almost 1000 sisters in numerous countries in nursing and care for the elderly and in childcare as well as in missions in Africa. The “Gasthaus” / “Elisabeth Hospital” she runs was initially relocated to the edge of the Aachen city garden as the “Maria Hilf Hospital” in the early 1850s and gradually changed to the “Städtisches Elisabeth Hospital Aachen” as early as 1904 newly built facilities on Goethestrasse, where it was integrated into the newly established Aachen University Hospital in the west of the city in the 1960s . In the wing of the original “Gasthaus” on Münsterplatz, the “Vinzenzspital” was set up from the 1850s to the turn of the century, in which the Elisabethinnen took care of the terminally ill.

literature

• Josef Brosch: Mother Apollonia Radermecher. The master of charity . Episcopal Diocesan Archives, Aachen 1953.
• Erich Linhardt, Ralf A. Höfer: The Elisabethinen in Graz. A history of the Elisabethinen monastery and hospital in the Styrian capital, as well as notes on this order and its namesake. Styria, Graz 1995.
• Ekkart Sauser :  Apollonia Radermecher. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 17, Bautz, Herzberg 2000, ISBN 3-88309-080-8 , Sp. 1093-1095.

Web links

• Mother Apollonia , portrait on the pages of the Order of Elizabeth
• Joachim Schäfer: Apollonia Radermecher , entry in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
• History of the Elisabethinen , on the homepage of the order