Sisters of the poor child Jesus

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  • Kind-Jesu-Chapel on the site of the former Weißfrauenkloster (2020)

  • First mother house of the order in the former Dominican monastery (2020)

The Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus is a Catholic order that was founded on February 2, 1844 on the initiative of Clara Fey in Aachen . It developed from a private school for the poor that was organized by her , which wanted to counteract the impoverishment and neglect of numerous children as well as the widespread child labor. The order had its first motherhouse in the former Dominican monastery in Aachen on Jakobstrasse there and, as a result of the culture war, moved its headquarters to Simpelveld , the Netherlands , where the general motherhouse was until 2012 before it was moved back to Aachen- Burtscheid .

The order currently has almost 500 sisters in 61 convents. It is led by the General Superior and her council and is divided into independent provinces with several branches or communities as well as dependent regions, which are either subordinate to the provinces or directly to the motherhouse. The order supports school and extracurricular educational work, social work and nursing as well as spiritual accompaniment in all situations.

The leitmotif of the order is manete in me - “ abide in me ” ( Jn 15.4  EU ).

Prehistory and early years

As in many other cities, the consequences of early industrialization made themselves felt in Aachen . The mechanization of both the cloth and needle industry, which was predominant in Aachen, as well as the mining industry, led to depressing conditions in many of the poorly paid working-class families : child labor to supplement the family income in the factories or mines of more than ten hours was common, and working conditions in unheated halls were inhumane and the workers' dwellings had run down for lack of their own savings.

Monastery of the Sisters of the Poor Child of Jesus with the Child Jesus Chapel around 1910 (on the right the former Dominican monastery, in front the monument to the Wehrhafter Schmied , built in 1909 )

From an early age, Clara Fey, herself the daughter of a wealthy cloth manufacturer and shaped by her teacher, the poet Luise Hensel , dealt with the fate of orphans and children of poor parents, the number of whom grew steadily with the growth of the industrial workers in her hometown. With the support of her brother Andreas Fey (1806–1887), who has been chaplain at the Dominican monastery church, St. Paul in Aachen , since 1830 , the friends of her family and fellow schoolmates discussed measures over and over again as part of regular Sunday conversations to help the neglected children. The considerations became concrete after Clara Fey had finished her training at St. Leonhard in 1830. So she initially rented a room with Leocadia Startz (1819–1890), Wilhelmine Istas (1814–1893) and Louise Vossen (1806–1889) and set up a “school” there, from which with effect from February 3, 1837 the first Aachen school for the poor came into being. However, the work with the children showed that the hard-won successes were nullified when the children had to return to the home environment in the evening. So three years later the four women rented a house where the most vulnerable children lived and could be looked after around the clock. From 1842, with the approval of the incumbent Lord Mayor Edmund Emundts, the former Dominican monastery Aachen and the neighboring former white and celester convent Aachen , which was used as a wool warehouse for the cloth manufacturer Ignaz van Houtem from 1802 until the takeover, could be taken over. In addition to the charitable and social tasks, the women put their project on a spiritual Christian-Catholic basis, through which they could define themselves.

Finally, on February 2, 1844, Clara Fey founded the order of the "Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus" together with her aforementioned friends. At their side were Clara Fey's brother Andreas, pastor Wilhelm Sartorius , later chairman of the board of directors of the children's ministry “ Die Sternsinger ”, Bishop Johannes Theodor Laurent , who was expelled from his diocese in Luxembourg , and the pastor and founder of the Aachen priesthood, Leonhard Aloys Joseph Nellessen .

The order set itself the task of supporting needy children and young people in particular through the possibility of school education and social support. In 1845 the statutes of the order were submitted to the responsible archbishop of Cologne, Johannes Cardinal von Geissel , who approved the new congregation in 1848 . With effect from September 14, 1848, this established its first generalate in Aachen's Jakobstrasse. Since then, the sisters have been wearing the religious clothing, consisting of a black habit as a sign of repentance and above the white scapular of the Dominicans, since Clara Fey had placed her work under the protection of St. Dominic . In 1850, the first new sisters could take their vows and Clara Fey was elected Superior General.

The young order grew rapidly. In 1852 84 women had already joined him, in 1862 he had 300 sisters. On May 12, 1869, the order of the "sisters of the poor child Jesus" by Pope Pius IX. recognized as a " religious order of papal law " and his successor Leo XIII. 1888 confirmed the constitutions of the order based on the Augustine Rule .

The founders of the order

  • Clara Fey

  • Mother Theresia - Leocadia Startz

  • Mother Dominika - Wilhelmine Istas

  • Mother Aloysia - Louise Vossen

Supporter and companion of your new establishment

  • Andreas Fey

  • Pastor Sartorius

  • Chaplain Istas

  • Bishop Laurent

Time of the Kulturkampf

Until the beginning of the Kulturkampf in 1872, around 600 sisters lived in 27 branches of the order in Prussia . There were also houses in Austria and Luxembourg. The activities of the sisters, both in the form of founding and working in existing institutions, expanded from services in schools and boarding schools to orphanages, kindergartens, commercial schools, women's technical schools and other institutes for care, especially for young women. In addition, the sisters ran a world-renowned monastery workshop for paraments . They were instructed in detail in the design of patterns and in the processing techniques of old vestments by the Aachen canon and art historian Franz Bock , who also arranged extensive work assignments for them through his numerous contacts.

In the context of the Kulturkampf promoted by Otto von Bismarck, the religious school supervision was replaced by the state Prussian school supervision due to legal regulations and the church institutions were withdrawn from state grants with the bread basket law. After all, after the enactment of the Monastery Act 1875, which dissolved the monastery cooperatives in Prussia, with the exception of those who dealt with the nursing of the sick, all branches of the Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus except for one in Aachen-Burtscheid, which was dedicated to the care of members of the order, getting closed. In contrast, seven branches, among others in England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands were established, with Clara Fey itself in 1878 as exiles in the Dutch Simpelveld a new parent, called "House of Loreto " founded, which according to the plans of Aachen architect Hermann Josef Hurth built has been.

After the end of the Kulturkampf in 1887, some of the nuns returned to Prussia and they were able to reopen five religious houses in the next few years. Clara Fey herself stayed in Simpelveld and was re-elected Superior General in 1888. She died there on May 8, 1894 and was buried in the Loreto house before she was transferred to the cathedral crypt of Aachen Cathedral in 2012 and finally to the Infant Jesus Chapel of the former mother house in Jakobstraße in 2018 on the occasion of her beatification.

Further development

Aachen-Burtscheid community and today's parent company of the German branches

The congregation had 1,160 members when Clara Fey died and it began to expand both inside and outside Europe. In the course of the next decades branches were established in Latvia (since 1927), in Indonesia, Colombia and Kazakhstan and, more recently, in Peru.

The branches in Western Europe and the United States are seeing a decline in the number of religious vocations and an aging community, while the congregation in Colombia and Indonesia is growing. A total of around 80 “Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus” currently live in the German branches, which are managed from Aachen-Burtscheid. The former motherhouse with the Kind-Jesu-Kapelle in Jakobstraße has been owned by the Aachen diocese since 1989 and is only inhabited by a small sister convent that looks after the property there. Until 1989 the sisters found their final resting place in a burial ground in Aachen's Ostfriedhof , which is one of the larger fields and where more than 350 members of the order were buried.

Child Jesus Chapel

After the order of the Kind-Jesu-Sisters took over the former white women or celester nuns, their buildings were largely demolished and replaced by new ones. After the return of the sisters from exile, the chapel had to be rebuilt in 1891, whereby only the inner core of the old building has been preserved. Four slender, raised arched windows were let into the northern outer wall, whereas the choir walls and the south wall remained windowless despite the built-in window niches . The interior had a single nave with a hexagonal chancel. The east side of the chancel, which was also windowless, was decorated with a large cross on its outer wall. The only reminiscent of the old White Convent is a round arched door set into the south wall, on the keystone of which the coat of arms of the Aachen lay judges von Hartman and the year 1691 are engraved. Later excavations also found a grave slab of Elisabeth von Woestenrath, who was buried in the old monastery, which was embedded in the wall of the cloister. Under the choir of the church was the preserved crypt of the white women and under the former lower choir that of the Cölestinen. Numerous small marble slabs with words of thanks for answers to prayer were attached as paneling on the inner walls.

The Kind-Jesu-Chapel was badly damaged by bombs in World War II and only the apse wall with the cross remained. When the chapel was rebuilt in 1954 in the modern post-war style, this cross was placed in the chancel. In 2017, the interior of the chapel was redesigned in order to create an adequate space for the final burial of the order's founder. The vestibule remained as the place of Marian veneration, followed by the room of Clara Fey's reliquary shrine, which is equipped with a field of stelae surrounding the shrine for the description of her life and a portrait of the founder of the order. The whitewashed nave is flooded with light and has been sparingly equipped with modern church furniture.

  • Clara Fey's final resting place

  • Nave with the cross from the former outer facade

  • Stele room with organ gallery

literature

Web links

Commons : Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annuario Pontificio , 2016 edition, p. 1604.
  2. ↑ Ernst Benz : The Roman Catholic Church in Latvia 1918–1940 . In: Boris Meissner , Dietrich André Loeber , Detlef Henning (eds.): The German ethnic group in Latvia during the interwar period and current issues of German-Latvian relations . Bibliotheca Baltica, Tallinn 2000, ISBN 9985-800-21-4 , pp. 162-174, here p. 173.
  3. ↑ Construction site of the Kind-Jesu-Kapelle, Jakobstraße , on the menete-in-me.org website of October 29, 2017
  4. ↑ Paul Clemen : Aachen City monasteries and their history , In: Karl Faimonville, including: The monuments of the city of Aachen . Bd. II .: The churches of the city of Aachen . Düsseldorf 1922
  5. ↑ Kind-Jesu-Kapelle becomes place of worship for Clara Fey , on the pages of the diocese of Aachen from April 20, 2018