Atonement foot pilgrimage to the Holy Cross of Pless
Sühnefußwallfahrt the Holy Cross of Pless is a going back to the year 1665 and reintroduced in 1973 Sühnefußwallfahrt in the form of a candlelight procession , beginning at the parish church of the Sacred Heart in Fellheim to about two kilometers away, supposedly miracle-working cross in the chapel Hl. Kreuz on the district of Pleß in the Unterallgäu district . The pilgrimage takes place every second Monday from May to November and up to a thousand pilgrims from the Illertal and the surrounding area take part.
Lore
According to tradition, became blind in 1661 of the four-year-old Christoph Baur, son of Mr and Mrs Sebastian and Sara Baur Oberdettingen . After a fortnight the family asked for help from the relative Bader Martin Mayr from Niederrieden . So father and son rode to their cousin . On the way there, they passed a damaged field cross in the corridor between Pless and Fellheim. As he passed the cross, the blind boy began to speak and said: Look, father, there is a cross! The father asked the son what else he was seeing, and the child described the entire environment, the sky and the earth, everything he saw. Then the father realized that his blind son could see again. Father and son stopped at the field cross and gave thanks to God. The father promised God that he would have the field cross repaired in the foreseeable future at his own expense.
In 1665 another child of the farmer suffered from a serious eye disease . However, the farmer had not kept his promise to renew the field cross in the past four years . He immediately had the cross renovated and his child was healed of the eye disease. This was interpreted as a second miracle. The events at the cross in Pless got around and over time a small pilgrimage to the Pless cross developed.
From 1677 pilgrims began to collect money for a chapel by the cross. In 1685, a chapel was built around the cross in a two-year construction period. Imperial Count Johann Rudolf Fugger took over the patronage . In 1685, the episcopal ecclesiastical license came from Augsburg for the construction of the chapel.
Today's Atonement Pilgrimage
In 1973 the clergyman and pastor of Fellheim August Ritter suggested a revival of the pilgrimage. The distance between Fellheim and Pless is about so long that a full rosary can be prayed during that time . Eight porters carry the statue of the Madonna of Our Lady of Fátima . The pilgrims celebrate Holy Mass in front of the Holy Cross Chapel . Then the procession goes back the same way to the Sacred Heart Church, where the participants receive the pastor's final blessing.
literature
- Klaus Herbers , Lenka Jiroušková, Bernhard Vogel (eds.): Miracle reports of the early and high Middle Ages . Latin and German. With the collaboration of Clemens Heydenreich, René Hurtienne, Sofia Seeger and Bernhard Waldmann (= Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gedächtnisausgabe, Series A, Vol. 43), Darmstadt 2005
- Annegret Wenz-Haubfleisch: Miracula Post Mortem. Studies on the source value of high medieval miracle collections, primarily from the East Frankish-German Empire. Siegburg 1998 (Siegburger Studien, 26). ISBN 3-87710-190-9
