Neviges pilgrimage cathedral

Pilgrimage Cathedral of Neviges, October 2008

View from the processional way to the church, in October 2008

The Neviges pilgrimage cathedral (actually pilgrimage church Maria, Queen of Peace ) is a pilgrimage church on the Hardenberg in the Velbert district of Neviges . Together with the former pilgrimage church of St. Mary's Conception in Neviges and St. Antonius of Padua in Tönisheide, it forms the Roman Catholic parish of Maria, Queen of Peace in the Archdiocese of Cologne . A Franciscan monastery existed at the church until 2019 .

History of the pilgrimage

The origin of the pilgrimage is considered to be an apparition of Mary by the Dorsten Franciscan Antonius Schirley in 1676, who heard a voice praying that said: "Take me to Hardenberg, I want to be venerated there!"

When the Prince-Bishop of Paderborn and Münster , Ferdinand von Fürstenberg , unexpectedly regained his health after a serious illness, he made a pilgrimage to Neviges as thanks and also financed the completion of the Franciscan monastery that was already under construction there . On October 27, 1681, the miraculous image of the Immaculate Virgin Mary was transferred from the Franciscan monastery in Dorsten to Neviges. In 1682, Prince Elector Johann Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg ( Jan Wellem ) and his wife Maria Anna Josepha of Austria donated the Chapel of Mercy. In 1688 the pilgrimage was officially approved by Johann Heinrich von Anethan , then Cologne Vicar General . Pope Clement XII. promised all Hardenberg pilgrims complete relief from the penalties for sin .

The church of St. Mary's Conception , which was completed as a monastery church in 1728, below today's pilgrimage church, was a pilgrimage church until 1968 and is still the Catholic parish church of Neviges to this day. The Franciscans ended their work in Hardenberg-Neviges at the end of 2019. From January 1, 2020, district dean Daniel Schilling, pastor in Ratingen, took over responsibility for pilgrimage and parish pastoral care. In September 2020, the St. Martin Community (“Communauté Saint-Martin”) founded in France in 1976 will take over pastoral care and establish a new branch in the previous Franciscan monastery.

The Franciscan Monastery

1675 donated Anna of Bernsau (born of Asbeck), the widow of 1649 converted to Catholicism and 1655 who died Johann Sigismund of Bernsau that Franziskanerkloster and called 1675 Franciscans of Saxon Franciscan Province Saxonia to Neviges the rule Hardenberg where they on 15th August 1676. The monastery was built between 1680 and 1697. From 1729 the monastery in Neviges was a novitiate monastery of the order province of Saxonia next to the Franciscan monastery Hamm .

In the course of secularization , Elector Maximilian Joseph of Palatinate-Bavaria abolished the monasteries in his domain on July 1, 1804, including the convent in Hardenberg-Neviges , located in the Duchy of Berg . Since the Neviges Franciscans took over the pastoral care and stayed in the convent buildings, the formally dissolved monastery still existed. In September 1812 it even became a central or extinction monastery, in which the brothers of the dissolved monasteries could live until their death. In 1826 King Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia , to which Neviges now belonged, the continued existence of some monasteries, including the one in Neviges. On the intervention of several neighboring parishes and the Archbishop of Cologne Johannes von Geissel , the monastery was allowed to accept new members again from 1845.

In 1875, Prussia ordered the dissolution of the orders and the closure of the monasteries in the Monastery Act as part of the Kulturkampf . On June 24, 1875, the mayor and district administrator informed the 11 brothers in the monastery that it would be dissolved on December 3, 1875; the date was later brought forward to August 15. The brothers said that they would only leave the monastery under police force. Three Franciscans of the Neviges monastery, who had been working in Neviges since August 1872 on behalf of the Archbishop of Cologne, declared to the church council in May 1875 that they intended to resign from the Franciscan order. This enabled them to remain as pastors in the pilgrimage and the parish. They were the parish administrator and guardian Basilius Pfannenschmidt and the Fathers Bruno Kröger and Aurelius Drewes. On August 8, 1887, the Prussian government again approved a branch of the order in Neviges for the purpose of temporary pastoral care.

Many pilgrims came to Neviges, especially in times of crisis. The first 100,000 pilgrims were counted in 1913, 340,000 in 1935 and 300,000 in 1954. In 1911 the Franciscans opened a retreat house in Neviges . When the Cologne Franciscan Province was revived by the Three Kings ( Colonia ) in 1929 , the convent in Neviges joined it with the other monasteries of the Saxon Province located in the Rhineland. With the new pilgrimage church, a monastery was also built, to which the brothers moved in 1968; the old monastery was right next to the parish church of St. Mary's Conception . After the merger of the four Franciscan provinces in Germany in 2010, the convent belonged to the German Franciscan Province of St. Elisabeth ( Germania ).

The Franciscans supervised the pilgrimage until the end of 2019 and were also active in the pastoral care of the parish of Maria, Queen of Peace . The German Franciscan Province decided in March 2019 to dissolve seven monasteries, including Neviges, on January 31, 2020, due to a lack of young people and to concentrate their strengths. On January 12, 2020, the Franciscans, after having worked there for over 340 years, were replaced by the Cologne Auxiliary Bishop Dominikus Schwaderlapp said goodbye to Neviges with a solemn service.

Pilgrimage Church of Mary, Queen of Peace

Open design of the interior reminiscent of a marketplace

Today's pilgrimage church "Maria, Königin des Friedens" was designed by the architect Gottfried Böhm . In terms of architectural history, the building is to be assigned to brutalism . Although Gottfried Böhm did not take first place in the previous architecture competition , he was ultimately commissioned with the execution at the personal request of the then Archbishop of Cologne, Joseph Cardinal Frings . Archbishop Frings, whose vision was already limited, had the competition models demonstrated to him so that he could feel them. The Böhm design appealed to him so much that he asked for a second competition with new specifications. This was then decided in favor of Böhm. Böhm himself holds back with an interpretation of the form. For him, the building offered the opportunity to implement a suspended concrete structure in which the wall and ceiling elements create a community that supports one another. The Mariendom was built from 1966 to 1968. On May 22, 1968, Auxiliary Bishop Vitus Chang SVD consecrated the church. Joseph Cardinal Frings celebrated Holy Mass the next day and opened the church for pilgrimage. With more than 6,000 seats, the church is the second largest in the Archdiocese of Cologne after Cologne Cathedral .

The building is intended to make the understanding of the Church of the Second Vatican Council visible in an exemplary way . The tent , the dwelling of the “wandering people of God”, takes the place of the permanent castle ; The “closed society” is replaced by a presence on the “marketplaces of the world”. The external shape of the building resembles that of a large tent. Inside, however, the main altar seems to be in the center of a wide market square, which the galleries surround like windowed houses and to which a wide street leads from the outside. This connection between "outside" and "inside", i.e. the church forecourt and the interior of the church, Böhm has also underlined through the spatial formation, the choice of materials and the motifs: the curved pathways of the wide church and processional access opens up and widens to the inside Market place-like church space, also the outside paving is continued inside, as well as the free-standing street lamps.

The recurring symbol of the interior design is the Rose , signs of the Virgin Mary , whose large format in the window glazing the exposed concrete walls of the interior of the hardness and emphasize the red and white color fields at a suitable incidence of sunlight consecration and dignity of the place atmosphere. The original, very small miraculous image is embedded in a large Stele of Mary by Elmar Hillebrand , from which Mary and the child grow out of a tree of life and the inner side and "backbone" of which forms the visible cross with its three ends .

In September 1978 Cardinal Karol Wojtyła , a great devotee of Our Lady, visited the Church with a group of pilgrims from Kraków , three weeks before his election as Pope . A memorial plaque near the Marian stele and an oil painting by Clemens Hillebrand commemorate this incident .

Theft and return of the miraculous image

On the evening of February 5, 2016 it became known that the miraculous image of Neviges (a postcard-sized image of the Blessed Mother as Immaculata from the middle of the 17th century) had been removed from its stele and stolen by strangers . On the following Saturday the Franciscans found it lying in front of their monastery gate. The perpetrator and motive are still unclear.

organ

In May 2010 the organ of the cathedral was inaugurated. The instrument goes back to an organ that was built in 1976 by the organ building company Stockmann (Werl) for the Antonius Church in Hildesheim . This instrument was installed in 2010 by the organ building company Seifert (Kevelaer) in the Mariendom and extended by an auxiliary movement with 6 registers , which can be registered independently of each other on both manuals and the pedal . In addition to the original swell of the second manual, the auxiliary movement is housed separately in a 16 'swell. A completely new intonation has aligned the work excellently towards the large church space. In 2012 a new clear 8 'clarinet was installed in the swell.

I main work C – a ³

Drone

16 ′

Principal

8th'

Pointed flute

8th'

Octave

4 ′

Gemshorn

4 ′

Fifth

2 ² ⁄ ₃  ′

Octave

2 ′

Mixture IV

1 ¹ ⁄ ₃  ′

horn

8th'

Tremulant

II Swell C – a ³

Reed flute

8th'

Gamba

8th'

Unda maris

8th'

(2010)

Principal

4 ′

recorder

4 ′

Nazard

2 ² ⁄ ₃  ′

Forest flute

2 ′

third

1 ³ ⁄ ₅  ′

Clarinet

8th'

(2012)

Hautbois

8th'

(2010)

Tremulant

Pedal C – f ¹
Contrabass	32 ′
Sub bass	16 ′
Octavbass	8th'
Dacked bass	8th'
Choral bass	4 ′
Pedal mixture IV	2 ² ⁄ ₃  ′
Contraposaune	32 ′
bassoon	16 ′

I, II, P Auxiliary work C – a ³
Seraphonprincipal	16 ′	(2010)
Seraphonprincipal	8th'	(2010)
Seraphonoctave	4 ′	(2010)
tuba	16 ′	(2010)
Trumpet	8th'	(2010)
Clarine	4 ′	(2010)

Pairing :
- Normal coupling: II / I, I / P, II / P
- Sub-octave coupling: I / I, II / I, II / II
- Super octave coupling: II / I, II / II
Remarks

(2010) = New register (2010)

(2012) = New register (2012)

↑ resounding
↑ from c ⁰ ; CH acoustically from Seraphonprinzipal 16 ′
↑ from c ⁰ ; CH acoustic from trombone 16 ′

Redevelopment

The folding roof proved to be leaking soon after the building was completed. A first renovation at the end of the 1970s, during which a plastic coating was applied, did not provide any permanent remedy. Water continued to penetrate through cracks and damage the reinforcement . Peter Böhm , Gottfried Böhm's son, together with RWTH Aachen University , developed a process for a textile concrete made of three layers of shotcrete with two layers of carbon fiber fabric with high tensile strength and low thickness. After laboratory tests, the procedure was tested on a sample area of the roof in 2015/2016 with financial support from the German Foundation for Monument Protection . Half of the roof area had been renovated by the beginning of 2020.

literature

Gerhard Haun: The pilgrimage to Neviges . Frohn Verlag, Wuppertal 1981, ISBN 3-88578-005-4 .
Veronika Darius: The architect Gottfried Böhm. Buildings from the sixties. Baumeisterforum, Beton-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1988, ISBN 3-7640-0236-0 .
Kunibert Bering: Gottfried Böhm: The pilgrimage church in Neviges. Sacred architecture as a correction of modernity. In: Architectura. Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Baukunst 1992, pp. 72–91.
Gerhard Haun: Mariendom Neviges. Kunstverlag Josef Fink, Lindenberg 1997, ISBN 3-931820-56-4 .
Oliver Elser, Miriam Kremser (curators and editors): Böhm 100 - the concrete cathedral of Neviges: Booklet accompanying the exhibition on the occasion of Gottfried Böhm's 100th birthday. German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt am Main 2020, ISBN 978-3-939114-06-2 .

Web links

Commons : Mary Queen of Peace in Neviges - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ Dieter Berg (Ed.): Traces of Franciscan History. Chronological outline of the history of the Saxon Franciscan provinces from their beginnings to the present. Werl 1999, pp. 387, 389.

↑ Dieter Berg (Ed.): Traces of Franciscan History. Werl 1999, p. 409.

↑ Web presence Pastor Daniel Schilling [1]

↑ kathisch.de : Marian pilgrimage site Neviges gets a new spiritual community , June 1st, 2020

↑ Dieter Berg (Ed.): Traces of Franciscan History. Werl 1999, pp. 383, 385, 387, 411.

↑ Dieter Berg (Ed.): Traces of Franciscan History. Werl 1999, pp. 447, 449, 455, 463, 471.

↑ Dieter Berg (Ed.): Traces of Franciscan History. Werl 1999, pp. 491-495, 507.

↑ Dieter Berg (Ed.): Traces of Franciscan History. Werl 1999, pp. 535, 537 (number of pilgrims 1913).

↑ On the history of the Cologne Franciscan Province ( Memento of the original from March 23, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Anniversary exhibition in the Diocesan Library Cologne 2004 @1@ 2