Church family
The term church family denotes "a group of churches standing close together that liturgically belong together to form a unit".
The term was introduced by the art historian Edgar Lehmann in 1952. Church families arose due to the monastery rules and liturgical regulations, they contained several specialized church buildings. Many monasteries or secular pins were talking next to their monastery church separate oratorios for the canonical hours, often even in an inner and an outer oratory divided, and one outside of the exam location grave church. In addition, there was often a parish or parish church, a separate baptistery and other churches and chapels. The church family on the Hemmaberg , which was abandoned in the 6th century, comprised, for example, two double churches, a baptistery and a memorial chapel. For theIn the 11th century, Essen monastery is a church family , through the so-called testament of Abbess Theophanu , consisting of a collegiate church , crypt of the collegiate church, baptistery , an oratory, the St. Quintins chapel , a private chapel of the abbess, a St. Pantaleon chapel (presumably in the monastery building and for high-ranking guests) and the St. Gertruden Church outside the enclosure .
The system of the church family had its roots in the city-Roman church organization, where several church buildings or shrines were assigned to a cathedral. Worship in these churches was interrelated and viewed as a unity under the direction of the bishop . This was expressed, for example, in the system of station worship services . The early medieval Benedictine - Abbey looked the image of this urban church system. In the abbey, the churches of the city were to a certain extent grouped together on the monastery grounds, as a "church town" with a large number of churches and shrines, or even integrated as side altars in the monastery church. The convent office knows the resulting mass system as the “main mass” in the role of the Roman station celebration and also a large number of “secondary masses” in the other sanctuaries and at the “side altars” in order to give them due cultic veneration. The celebration of such secondary or private masses is not explained by the private piety of the individual priest-monk, but is to be understood as necessary and important in the context of the overall liturgy of the abbey. The fact that more and more monks were ordained priests did not correspond to pastoral constraints or excessive clericalism, but to the growing number of liturgical tasks of the monastic body.
literature
- Katrinette Bodarwé: “Church families ” - chapels and churches in early medieval women's communities. In: Dominion, Liturgy and Space. Studies on the medieval history of the women's monastery in Essen. Klartext, Essen 2002, ISBN 3-89861-133-7 .
- Angelus Albert Häussling: Monks' convention and Eucharistic celebration. A study of the mass in the western monastic liturgy of the early Middle Ages and the history of the frequency of measurements. Münster 1973, ISBN 3-402-03842-2 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Edgar Lehmann: The developmental position of the Carolingian monastery church between the church family and the cathedral. In: Scientific journal of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. 1952/1953, pp. 131-144, 132.
- ↑ So Angelus Albert Häussling: Monks' convent and Eucharistic celebration. A study of the mass in the western monastic liturgy of the early Middle Ages and the history of the frequency of measurements. Münster 1973, ISBN 3-402-03842-2 , pp. 298–347, esp. 321f, 342ff, against Otto Nussbaum, who took the position that an increased number of priest monks and their desire for more frequent mass celebrations out of personal piety would only have to Increase in the number of altars in the abbey; Otto Nussbaum: monastery, priest monk and private mass. Their relationship in the west from the beginnings to the high Middle Ages. (= Theophaneia . Vol. 14). Hanstein, Bonn 1961.