St. Gereon (Brachelen)

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St. Gereon in Brachelen
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St. Gereon is the Roman Catholic parish church in the Hückelhoven district of Brachelen in the Heinsberg district in North Rhine-Westphalia .

The church is dedicated to St. Gereon von Köln and entered under number 16 in the list of architectural monuments in Hückelhoven .

location

The church building is located in the center of Brachelen on Kirchgrabenstrasse.

history

Brachelen's church and parish can look back on a long history. A church is mentioned for the first time in 1245, when the Premonstratensian monastery in Heinsberg received the right of patronage . De Ort Brachelen appears as early as 1161, here it is stated that the Heinsberg Abbey of St. Gangolf received tithing . Even then, Brachelen was a parish . It is very likely that the Brachelener Church was originally a private church of the landlord. In 1263 the parish church was incorporated into the Heinsberg Premonstratensian monastery by the Archbishop of Cologne, Engelbert II. Von Falkenburg .

In the Liber valoris from 1308, Brachelen is listed as a parish in the extensive deanery of Jülich of the Archdiocese of Cologne . At that time the parish already included the villages of Hilfarth and Lindern . In the course of the restructuring of the ecclesiastical landscape in the French era , Brachelen came to the newly founded diocese of Aachen in 1802, and at the same time, Hilfarth von Brachelen was removed from the parish and made a parish. In 1825 the place came back to the Archdiocese of Cologne. The separation of Lindern and elevation to the parish took place in 1857. Since then, the parish no longer has any subsidiary parishes .

Building history

From the 12./13. There are no traces of the church mentioned in the 19th century. It can be assumed that it was a Romanesque hall church . This first church was gradually replaced in the 15th and 16th centuries by a new three-aisled step hall church in the Gothic style . A new nave was first built around 1430, followed by the construction of a new six-story bell tower in 1498, which was one of the highest bell towers in the area. In 1500 the church was completed with the construction of a new choir and a new sacristy . The alternating layers of brick and tuff in the masonry were characteristic of the building.

During the Second World War , the Gothic parish church was blown up by German troops in December 1944 and almost completely destroyed as a result, only the choir, the sacristy and the foundation walls of the tower remained. After the war, the surviving remains were secured between 1945 and 1948 and an emergency church was built in the ruins according to plans by the architect Karl Band from Cologne .

Proper reconstruction could only begin in the 1960s. With the plans you had the Mönchengladbacher architect Heinz Döhmen commissioned. With the inclusion of the tower stump and the choir, today's modern nave was built between 1963 and 1965 according to his plans. The construction of the tower followed a few years later. The church consecration took place on September 13, 1969.

Building description

St. Gereon is an irregular three-aisled hall church in the forms of modernism with a retracted bell tower in the west, the lower parts of the wall are Gothic and the upper parts are modern. The two-bay and five-sided closed choir is attached to the nave, which was built in 1500 and is vaulted by ribbed vaults .

Furnishing

Due to the destruction of the war, only a few historical pieces of equipment have survived. These include the baptismal font from 1752, a two-part choir stalls , a crucifixion group from the 15th and 16th centuries. Century and a figure of Mary with child Jesus from the 17th or 18th century. The rest of the equipment is modern. The granite altar was created by Siegfried Dammrath from Düsseldorf in 1969, the tabernacle and Ewig-Licht-Ampel are works by the Aachen sculptor Bonifatius Stirnberg from 1976. Hubert Spierling designed the stained glass windows in 1969 and 1999, they were made by the Dr. H. Oidtmann from Linnich made. The organ was manufactured as Opus 1458 by the Bonn company Johannes Klais Orgelbau 1972 and has 23 registers .

Bells

In the bell tower there are three historic bells of bronze . The largest and oldest bell is from the Aachen bell and piece caster Franz von Trier . The middle bell is from the traveling caster Christian Wilhelm Voigt, who came from the town of Dremmen not far from Brachelen. The smallest and youngest of the three historical bells was cast in the Otto bell foundry in Hemelingen / Bremen. All three bells had to be delivered in the Second World War and should be melted down for armament purposes. Fortunately, it did not melt down, so that the bells returned to Brachelen unharmed after the end of the war. If the bells had not been delivered, they would probably have been irretrievably destroyed when they were blown up in 1944.

No. Surname Casting year Caster Diameter
(mm) 		Weight
(kg, approx.) 		Percussive
( HT - 1 / 16 )
1 Maria 1660 Franz von Trier 1219 1050 it ′ -4
2 John 1743 Christian Wilhelm Voigt 1047 630 ges ′ +4
3 Gereon 1924 Karl Otto, F. Otto , Hemelingen 960 550 as ′ +5

Pastor

The following pastors have worked at St. Gereon so far:

from ... to Surname
1927-1954 Peter Berrenberg
1954-1977 Heinrich Jacobs
1977-1998 Peter Gerards
1999-2014 José Kallupilankal
2014-2016 Vacant
2016-2018 Georg Kaufmann

Web links

Commons : St. Gereon  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bischöfliches Generalvikariat (ed.): Handbuch des Bistums Aachen 3rd edition, Aachen 1994, p. 764.
  2. ↑ Bischöfliches Generalvikariat (ed.): Handbuch des Bistums Aachen 3rd edition, Aachen 1994, p. 765.
  3. ↑ Bischöfliches Generalvikariat (ed.): Handbuch des Bistums Aachen 3rd edition, Aachen 1994, p. 765.
  4. ^ Hückelhoven-Brachelen, Catholic Church of St. Gereon. In: Internet site Forschungsstelle Glasmalerei des 20. Jahrhundert eV Accessed on March 14, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Karl Walter: Bell customer . Pustet-Verlag, Regensburg 1913, p. 887 .
  6. ↑ Karl Walter: Bell customer . Pustet-Verlag, Regensburg 1913, p. 897 .
  7. ^ Gerhard Reinhold: Otto bells. Family and company history of the Otto bell foundry dynasty . Self-published, Essen 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-063109-2 , p. 588, particularly pages 84, 436, 535 .
  8. ↑ Gerhard Reinhold: Church bells - Christian world cultural heritage, illustrated using the example of the bell founder Otto, Hemelingen / Bremen . Nijmegen / NL 2019, p. 556, especially pp. 102, 413, 487 , urn : nbn: nl: ui: 22-2066 / 204770 (dissertation at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen).
  9. ^ Matthias poet: Brachelen (D), cath. Church of St. Gereon - full bells (video accompanying text). In: Youtube. Retrieved March 14, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Bischöfliches Generalvikariat (ed.): Handbuch des Bistums Aachen 3rd edition, Aachen 1994, p. 765.

Coordinates: 51 ° 0 ′ 10.8 "  N , 6 ° 14 ′ 32.3"  E