Poor Brothers of St. Francis
The Brothers of the Poor of St. Franziskus ( Latin : Congregatio Fratrum Pauperum Sancti Francisci , abbreviation : CFP ) are a brotherhood founded in Aachen in 1857 by the teacher Johannes Philipp Höver . Colloquially, they are also called the Höver Brothers after their founder or the Franciscan Brothers after their parent company Aachen . They are only occasionally represented in Germany, the USA, Brazil and the Netherlands in the areas of schooling and education, social work, care for the elderly and pastoral care.
history
The cooperative was founded at Christmas 1857 by four brothers of the Third Order of St. Francis . They were largely supported by Franziska Schervier and her Order of the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis (Schervier Sisters), founded in 1845, as well as by the Aachen district president Friedrich von Kühlwetter . The first brothers initially devoted themselves to night-time nursing for poor people, while they worked for the Schervier sisters in Aachen during the day. In 1858 they provided the brothers with an extension next to the monastery church of their mother house on the corner of Kleinmarschierstrasse and Elisabethstrasse as a new home and took care of their maintenance.
At the beginning of 1860, the number of brothers under Höver had grown to 12 and they were now able to acquire their first own motherhouse in Alexanderstraße with donations, in which they also ran an inn and a brewery. In April of the same year Johannes Höver resumed his teaching profession at the St. Peter's Free School, the number of which had grown to 140 in August 1861. From then on, the fraternity could focus on its main task, caring for neglected male adolescents and serving stumbled people in prisons and correctional institutions.
On January 5, 1861, the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Johannes von Geissel, approved the cooperative's statutes for a period of five years. Thus the fraternity was recognized as a “church body” with the status of a diocesan congregation and set up its first mother house in Großkölnstrasse. The final episcopal recognition did not take place until July 1, 1872. On February 8, 1863, the Armen Brothers took over as a branch of an institution for poor and abandoned boys in Cologne. Due to a severe headache, Johannes Höver handed over the leadership of the congregation in 1863 and died a year later on July 13, 1864. A few months later, the Leonard Monheim family of manufacturers gave the Armen brothers a piece of land at the foot of the Lousberg in Rütscher Strasse in Aachen. On this they built the Johannes-Höver-Haus Aachen , named after the founder of the order , which served as a monastery with an attached welfare school and apprentice home for the following 115 years. In addition, the order took over the care of the Karl-Josef-Heim in Aachen as a migrant, welfare and homeless institution in Heinrichsallee and the St. Josef-Haus for school children and apprentices in Richardstraße. In the following years the religious community expanded more and more and in 1866 they opened an education center in Materborn near Kleve and in 1869 took over the Catholic orphanage in Berlin-Moabit and an educational institution in Cologne .
In the course of the Kulturkampf , the brothers were expelled from what was then Prussia in 1877 and then moved to the Kerkrader district of Bleyerheide / Netherlands , where they first built a half-timbered building and in 1891 the monastery Maria von der Engeln , which served as their generalate for the next few decades . After the Kulturkampf was settled, they were able to return to Prussia in 1888 and resume their work in Aachen. Again they tried to expand and in 1891 took over the care of a workers' colony near Lamsdorf in Upper Silesia and in 1902 the Raphaelhaus in Dormagen . In 1990, they opened the boarding school for German and French boys in Gemmenich , Belgium , and in 1908 the educational institution with apprentice hospice St. Josephstift in Roermond, Netherlands, and had a branch in Cincinnati / Ohio since 1905 . At that time there were around 280 brothers active in the order, about 50 of them in America.
Finally, on July 19, 1910, the statutes of the fraternity received their final confirmation from Pope Pius X. It was not until 1932 that the Generalate and the Provincialate of the German Province could be re-established in the Aachen parent company. In 1938 the Congregation for the Brothers of the Poor of St. Francis was divided into a German, Dutch-Belgian, North American and Brazilian province and the Kerkrader monastery building was raised to the provincial house of the Dutch province.
In the course of the Second World War , the south wing and the chapel of the mother house were badly hit and destroyed in Allied bombing raids in 1944. During the subsequent reconstruction, the poor brothers received help from the population. Finally, the order had to sell the building for financial reasons in 1979 and set up a new generalate in a villa in the south of Aachen. This is where the bones of the order's founder and a life-size cross that Franziska Schervier had given them were finally transferred. In 1958, the Kerkrade monastery had been relieved of the duties of the Provinzialats because the greatly reduced number of members of the Order in the province no longer justified this, and finally had in 2008 to the Society of St. Pius X. sold.
The Armen brothers at Rather Broich in Düsseldorf had been running the Caritas home there since 1938 and developed a network of outpatient, inpatient and semi-inpatient support facilities from it. In addition, they were involved in the street newspaper fiftyfifty of the homeless project of the same name, for which the brothers Matthäus Werner and Hubert Ostendorf received the Düsseldorf Peace Prize in 2007. In 2017 the last two friars gave up their activities in Düsseldorf and returned to the Aachen mother house. Since it was founded and up until the 1970s, the brothers in the poor found their final resting place in a burial ground in Aachen's East Cemetery .
literature
- Max Heimbucher: The Orders and Congregations of the Catholic Church , Ferdinand Schöningk, Paderborn 1907, p. 500/501 ( digitalized )
- Ingeborg Schild , Elisabeth Janssen: The Aachen East Cemetery. Mayersche Buchhandlung , Aachen 1991, pp. 218-219, ISBN 3-87519-116-1 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Generalate of the Brothers of the Poor of St. Francis
- ↑ 'Arme Brüder' left Düsseldorf , in rp-online from August 31, 2017