Cellitinnen from St. Gertrud
The Congregation of the Cellites of St. Gertrude is a member of the Cellite family , which, although divided into different communities, is primarily dedicated to nursing the sick.
history
Middle Ages and Modern Times
At the request of the City Council of Düren to the Provincial of the Cellites in Cologne , six sisters came to the city in 1521 from the Cologne monastery "Zurzelle", where they took care of the plague sufferers. When they wanted to return to their convent after they had finished their work, the city magistrate gave them a house on Pletzergasse, the so-called Gertrudenhof. Under the patronage of St. Gertrude, St. Augustine and St. Alexius, the house soon became independent. But the community's connection to their Cologne hometown, from which they are usually a Dominican , was tornas a visitor, never left. We don't know much about the community, which consisted of about 18 sisters and dedicated themselves to nursing the sick in the near and far area of Düren. We hear that the monastery, which had twelve members in 1770, had a barn and a garden in addition to the actual monastery building in 1791. But even now they were so poor that they had to beg for corn and other things and regularly remind the city council of their annual donation of two malters of rye.
19th century
Three years later, on October 6, 1794, Cologne was occupied by French troops under the command of Jean-Baptiste Jourdan during the First Coalition War. The number of sisters fell, so that in 1801 the convent still had eleven sisters. In 1802, two authorities in the Départements de la Roer , namely the Bureau central de bienfaisance (welfare office) and the Commission de hospices ( hospice commission ), which was entrusted with the supervision of the hospitals, argued over which of them was responsible for the administration of the monastery. On June 21, 1806, it was finally subordinated to the Prefect of the Hospice Commission, who confiscated the monastery archives the following year. The failure of young women to enter the monastery had an impact on the age structure of the community. The poor administration finally stated in a letter to the vicar general in 1810 that a third of the sisters were old and unable to work and that new entrants were urgently needed. The vicar general could not change anything like the poor administration. By 1820 the number of sisters had fallen to eight, so that nine years later the community had no more than four able-bodied sisters, whose activities extended over the whole of Düren and Aachen .
The decline in personnel was accompanied by economic decline, so that in 1840 the superior asked the archbishop not to fill the vacant position of a chaplain, as he could not be paid. Due to the financial situation it was necessary to once a year around collectivist animals . It sometimes happened that a sister gave in the received natural produce, but not the cash. Only one third of the income of 2½ silver groschen per day of care went to the monastery. The other two thirds went to the nursing sister and the superior, who had an annual income of 50 thalers.
We know that the sisters have always had their own wealth, but in 1846 we hear that some sisters, with the knowledge of the superior, invested their money in the savings bank. This enabled them to come to over 100 thalers, but the monastery itself only received 197 thalers. It was not until 1853 that the monastery finances began to improve again, which was not least the work of the house chaplain, who lived in the monastery and took care of the matter. In that year, the supervision of the monastery's property passed from the poor administration to the vicariate general. Two years later, however, a dispute began between the two institutions about the same, as the state side did not want to do without it. The decision was not made until the Kulturkampf , when the district administrator appeared in the monastery on July 23, 1875, without prior notice, and inventoried the property. Other difficulties facing the community were internal rifts. After the retreat of 1853 , the sisters signed a protocol according to which they committed themselves to a common fund. But soon the first outbreaks came and the convent broke up into two camps.
When no well-meaning compromise proposal led to the settlement of the disputes, the archbishop left the matter for the sake of peace, but wanted to keep the practice of poverty in mind as a long-term goal. But the sisters were not left alone with the matter, so that the retreat of 1858 brought the decisive breakthrough and the individual members of the convent gave their savings to the superior during the same. Only two sisters could not bring themselves to this joint cash management, but that did not change the fact that the statutes of the Cologne Cellitinnen were introduced on October 26, 1860 and the perpetual vows were taken on December 25.
But there could be no question of peace in the house, as there was a renewed split in the community, which attached itself to the person of the superior. After an expansion of the monastery and the construction of a new chapel had started in 1860 , the first branch was founded in Holzweiler in 1863 . The community intended for two or three sisters met with rejection and had to be abolished after a few years. Four years later, the monastery commissioner still did not see a suitable person for the position of superior in the monastery, so that the community could only flourish through mother Paula Nesselrath, who was elected by the 13 sisters in 1882. Just five years after her election, she managed to set up her first branch in Buir and, in 1894, finally gained independence from overseeing poor management.
20th century and present
By 1910, the congregation of episcopal law had grown to 130 sisters in eleven branches. When Mother Paula's resignation from the office of Superior General (1921) there were already 199 sisters in 20 branches. Hardly had they aggregated into the Augustinian order on April 25, 1931, when the tribulations of the Third Reich broke out on the community, which culminated with the total destruction of Düren on November 16, 1944. The mother house, in which 26 sisters and numerous other people were killed, also fell victim to this attack. The Superior General now took her seat in the Novitiate House in Niederau , which he has remained to this day, as the old mother house was not rebuilt due to the lack of space. With the Third Reich, the number of new entrants also subsided, so that the congregation had to close numerous branches. In 1966 there were 124 sisters in 13 houses, in 1996 there were only 28 sisters in five houses. In 2009 they had eleven sisters.
The first secular leader of a religious order in the diocese of Aachen became the former director of the Caritas hospitals in the Düren district, Gabor Szük, in March 2020.
literature
- Hans Otto Brans, The Order of the Cellites for St. Gertrud in Düren 1521-2009, Düren 2010, ISSN 0343-2971
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Carl Dietmar: The military system in the city of Cologne from the 13th to the 18th century . In: Heinz-Günther Hunold (Hrsg.): From the city soldier to the red spark. Military and Carnival in Cologne . Greven-Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-7743-0372-X , p. 45.
- ↑ Aachener Zeitung: First secular leader of a religious order