Mission House St. Arnold
The St. Arnold Mission House was a monastery founded by the Steyler missionaries in the Neuenkirchen community in North Rhine-Westphalia . The mission house existed from December 10, 1929 to June 30, 2008 as a branch of the SVD. The building was demolished in the summer of 2016.
history
In search of a location for a mission house in the Münsterland , the Steyler missionaries ( Societas Verbi Divini, abbreviated SVD ) first founded the St. Ludgerus monastery in 1920 in rented rooms of the old Kreuzherren monastery in Bentlage in Rheine . In the same year, however, the Steylers intended to found a new monastery near the Neuenkirchen Land railway station . There were former camps for French and then Russian prisoners of war.
Donations, especially from the innkeeper August Schmitz from Neuenkirchen, gave the missionaries access to large and inexpensive wasteland and heather areas. At first, barracks served as accommodation, the foundation stone for the mission house then took place on July 18, 1928. The official inauguration of the mission house took place on December 10, 1929 by Johannes Poggenburg , the bishop of Münster . Before that, on September 30, 1929, a boarding school had been set up and school operations started. The school was later named Arnold-Janssen-Gymnasium and continues to exist, now under episcopal sponsorship.
During the war, the mission house became a reserve hospital. Only a few priests remained in the house, which secretly even served as a theological college for the training of priestly candidates for a short time due to the expropriation, confiscation and closure of most of the Steyler mission houses. Here also spent Brother Kostka (Josef Wasel) SVD, whose miraculous healing in the beatification and canonization process of its founder St. Arnold Janssen played a significant role and its mystic visions became known later, his last years.
The St. Arnold Mission House was also the spiritual nucleus of the St. Arnold district named after it and, since the parish rectorate was established, “ad st. arnoldum ”in 1941 by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen the parish rectors and pastors of the parish of St. Josef in St. Arnold, which was reunited with St. Anna in 2005 .
The Franciscan Sisters of Münster and St. Mauritz worked in the kitchen, laundry, boarding school and nursing home of St. Arnold from the end of the Second World War until June 2000.
On January 1, 1996, the diocese of Münster took over the school sponsorship of the Arnold-Janssen-Gymnasium located in the mission house.
For personal and financial reasons, the order gave up the mission house after almost 80 years. On June 30th, 2008 the last rector of the house, Father Helmut Stadermann, left the building with a total of 8 other priests and brothers. While most of the building was unused from now on, one wing of the building was still used for classrooms at the adjacent Arnold-Janssen-Gymnasium. The former mission building was temporarily placed under monument protection after August 20, 2008, by order of the mayor of Neuenkirchen. The Diocese of Münster but remained as the new owner in the decision to demolish. The monument protection was subsequently reduced to the portal, after originally the entire facade should have been preserved.
In 2015 the chapel of the mission house was demolished. The school services that were held there until then have since been held in the break hall or the sports hall of the school or, if the weather is nice, outdoors. At the end of 2015, the public briefly discussed the possibility of accommodating refugees in the vacant main building. However, this was rejected by the owner, among other things, with reference to the inadequate suitability of the dilapidated building for adequate and humane accommodation.
In July / August 2016, the main building was demolished during the summer vacation.
What remains is the listed portal, which is to be integrated into the future construction of a multi-purpose building for the adjoining Arnold-Janssen-Gymnasium. The former sister house, in which the last Steyler Pater Hanh who remained in St. Arnold, lives and coordinates the care of the Catholics with Vietnamese roots living in northern Germany, has also remained.
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Monastery cemetery
About 200 deceased Steyler missionaries remain in the monastery cemetery, including the missionary bishop Hermann Westermann and his brother Kostka . The former “forest chapel” became the cemetery chapel, which is now a listed building, with a cast of the Pietà by the artist Pater Büttgens SVD.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Homepage of the Diocese of Münster - Opinion regarding the St. Arnold Mission House in Neuenkirchen. In: www.bistum-muenster.de. Retrieved August 16, 2016 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 12 ′ 17 ″ N , 7 ° 24 ′ 16 ″ E