St. Johannes (Geroldswil)
The Church of St. Johannes is the Roman Catholic parish church of Geroldswil in the canton of Zurich . It is located at Poststrasse 5b in the center of the village. The parish belonging to it is responsible for the places Geroldswil, Oetwil an der Limmat and Weiningen ZH .
history
History and naming
The name Geroltszwiler was first mentioned in a document in 1255 and means "Weiler Gerolds". In 1275, the Liber decimationis of the Diocese of Constance recorded a St. John's chapel in Unter-Oetwil . However, excavations in 1965 suggest that the St. John's Chapel had existed earlier. This chapel was located below the village between the village stream and the footpath to the ferry on the Limmat . After the Reformation , only a few Catholics lived in the communities of Oetwil, Geroldswil and Weiningen. They could attend catholic services in Fahr Monastery or in the Simultankirche in Dietikon or in Würenlos. Until 1798 Geroldswil was still part of the driver's estate and the Vogtei Weiningen. The place was a church from the Middle Ages through the Reformation to 1803 after St. Peter zu Würenlos. With the introduction of the mediation constitution in 1803, Unter-Oetwil came to the canton of Zurich and church to Weiningen. From this time on, church life in the St. John's Chapel became extinct, which is why it was subsequently torn down.
The church of St. Peter in Würenlos has had St. John and St. Kunigunde as the patronage of the front altar since it was consecrated by Bishop Heinrich II von Klingenberg in 1296 . For this reason the chapel in Unter-Oetwil was consecrated to St. John. Because of the medieval St. John's Chapel in Unter-Oetwil, today's parish church of Geroldswil was consecrated to St. John in 1972.
Development and construction history
With the construction of the Spanish-Brötli-Bahn and the ensuing industrialization of the Limmattal , more and more Catholics moved to Oetwil, Geroldswil and Weiningen from the beginning of the 20th century. From the establishment of the Heilig-Kreuz parish in Altstetten in 1899, the Catholics of these communities were initially looked after from Altstetten. After the pastoral care station and later parish of St. Josef was founded in Schlieren in 1923 , its clergy were responsible for the pastoral care of the Catholics of the right bank communities. On February 26, 1936, the parish of St. Agatha Dietikon was entrusted with the pastoral care of Geroldswil, Oetwil and the Fahrweid district of Weiningen. Weiningen-Dorf initially remained with St. Josef Schlieren and was assigned to the parish of St. Mauritius Oberengstringen in 1964 when it was founded . In 1956 a church building association was founded in Geroldswil. This took over the interest representation of the Catholics in the place and collected money for the building of their own church. In 1960 a property at Bergstrasse 3 was acquired for the newly established St. Johannes Foundation. On January 13, 1963, the first Catholic service for the Catholic population of Geroldswil and Oetwil took place in the Letten schoolhouse in Oetwil. The parish of Dietikon, to which Oetwil an der Limmat and Geroldswil also belonged, had 15,000 members in the 1960s, which is why the parish decided to build new parishes for better pastoral care in the surrounding communities and Dietik districts. After the establishment of the parish of St. Josef Dietikon, the parish of Geroldswil was founded. This coincided with the planning of the new Huebwis village center in Geroldswil. The political authorities of Geroldswil therefore invited the Catholics to get involved in the planning and realization of the new village center. The Hochwacht building cooperative was interested in the property at Bergstrasse 3 and offered the Catholics of Geroldswil an exchange of land so that St. John's Church could be built in the new Hubwies center . On June 23, 1969, the structure plan for the Huebwies center was approved and on September 9, 1970 the Dietikon parish approved the loan for the construction of St. John's Church in the middle of the new center of Geroldswil. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on February 8, 1971, and the foundation stone was laid on June 27 by the Bishop of Chur , Johannes Vonderach . The St. John's Church was then built according to plans by the architect Walter Moser , who also built the churches of Maria Hilf (Zurich-Leimbach) , St. Niklaus (Hombrechtikon) and the Ilanz Monastery . On May 27, 1972, the bells for the church of Geroldswil were consecrated in the Dietikon community center by the abbot of the Wettingen-Mehrerau monastery , Kassian Lauterer , and then transported to Geroldswil. On September 3, 1972, Bishop Johannes Vonderach consecrated the church and raised Geroldswil to an independent parish, also responsible for the Catholics of Oetwil and the Fahrweid district of Weiningen. In 1983 these areas were spun off from the Dietikon parish and merged into an independent parish. Weiningen-Dorf, which had belonged to the parish of Oberengstringen since it was founded in 1963, was assigned to the Geroldswil parish on January 1, 1985. In 2007 the church of St. Johannes was extensively renovated by the architect Felix Stemmle.
The parish of St. Johannes with its 3,751 members (as of 2017) is one of the smaller Catholic parishes in the canton of Zurich.
Building description
Church tower and exterior
A staircase leads from the lower Huebwiesenstrasse to the community square , which was newly created in the 1970s, around which the offices of the political community, the post office, a hotel, an indoor swimming pool, a bank and various shops are grouped. In the middle of this center is the Catholic Church of St. John. It is not obvious that this simple concrete building is a church center, as the church was optically aligned with the other buildings around the village square. A roof turret , in which the three bells of the Church of St. John are located and to which a tower clock and a simple metal cross are attached, refers to the ecclesiastical use of the building. The three-part bell was cast by Emil Eschmann , Rickenbach TG in 1972 and sounds in the tone sequence f sharp, a, h. Next to the entrance there is a relief-like inscription on the concrete wall: "John the Baptist". The visitor arrives through a foyer in the actual church of St. John.
Interior and artistic equipment
The church interior is a rectangular concrete building, the rear part of which can be separated by a partition wall embedded in the floor during smaller church services. The floor is made of light stone, the walls are painted gray concrete and the church ceiling is made of light materials. Wooden chairs are grouped in a semicircle around the raised by a step chancel which does not faces east is, but shows in southeastern direction. The daylight penetrates the room through a long, longitudinally central skylight. This skylight is located in the raised part of the room, giving the impression of a three-nave church. The folk altar and the ambo are made of wood and thus create a reference to the wooden chairs of the community, which underlines the communion character of this post-Vatican church. A simple wooden cross is attached to the concrete wall behind the chancel. To the right of the chancel is the tabernacle on the choir wall . It protrudes from the wall by means of a concrete structure that takes up the square shapes and the rounded corners of the room architecture. In the illuminated interior of the tabernacle, the ciborium is visible as a sign of God's real presence. The organ stands on the left side of the sanctuary. In the left part of the church, a smaller, blue stained glass window is set into the side wall. The statue of St. John on the opposite side wall of the church is significant in terms of art history. This medieval statue of St. John comes from the church of Würenlos, which Unter-Oetwil also belonged to until the beginning of the 19th century. The Geroldswil Church Foundation agreed with the Würenlos parish in 2010 that the statue could be erected in the Church of St. Johannes in Geroldswil for an indefinite period.
organ
The organ of St. Johanneskirche was made in 1978 by Orgelbau Felsberg AG in Felsberg GR . It is an instrument with 12 sounding registers on 2 manuals and a pedal . The wind is supplied by a fan through a multi-bellows rising in parallel. There are two separate wind tunnels for the pedal and the manuals. In 1996, a general overhaul was carried out by Orgelbau Felsberg AG. The earlier doublet 2 'in the second manual was replaced by today's flute 2'. The second pipes in the principal 8 ′ (the hanging pipes of the mirror principal in the prospectus) have been muted. In 2001 the organ was revised by Metzler Orgelbau .
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- Coupling : II / I (manual slide coupling), I / P, II / P
literature
- Episcopal Ordinariate Chur (ed.): Schematism of the Diocese of Chur. Chur 1980.
- Ernst Bauer, Marcel Alther: 40 years of St. Johannes Church. Geroldswil 2012.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Episcopal Ordinariate Chur (ed.): Schematism of the Diocese of Chur. P. 209.
- ↑ Ernst Bauer, Marcel Alther: 40 years of St. Johannes Church. P. 1.
- ↑ Ernst Bauer, Marcel Alther: 40 years of St. Johannes Church. P. 6.
- ↑ Episcopal Ordinariate Chur (ed.): Schematism of the Diocese of Chur. P. 209.
- ↑ Ernst Bauer, Marcel Alther: 40 years of St. Johannes Church. Pp. 1-2
- ↑ Ernst Bauer, Marcel Alther: 40 years of St. Johannes Church. P. 4
- ↑ Ernst Bauer, Marcel Alther: 40 years of St. Johannes Church. Pp. 7-17 and 36.
- ↑ Catholic Church in the Canton of Zurich (Ed.): Annual Report 2017, p. 83.
- ↑ Ernst Bauer, Marcel Alther: 40 years of St. Johannes Church. P. 5.
- ^ Organ directory Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Section Catholic Church St. Johannes Geroldswil ZH. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
Coordinates: 47 ° 25 '21.3 " N , 8 ° 24' 37.8" E ; CH1903: 673 333 / 252873