St. Matthew (War Field)
 Entrance of the Catholic Church in Kriegsfeld |
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| Basic data | |
| Denomination | Catholic |
| Country | Germany |
| Patronage | Matthew |
| Building history | |
| architect | Albert Boßlet , Karl Lochner |
| construction time | 1935-1936 |
| Building description | |
| inauguration | September 20, 1936 |
| Architectural style | Neo-romance |
| Construction type | Hall construction |
| 49 ° 42 '37 " N , 7 ° 55' 1.5" E | |
St. Matthäus is the Catholic church of the local community in Kriegsfeld in the Donnersbergkreis . The neo-Romanesque church is now a branch church of the parish of St. Anna in Kirchheimbolanden in the Speyer diocese .
history
After Kriegsfeld was slammed to the Protestants in the course of the Palatinate church division , a Catholic parish was reopened in the village in 1759 after efforts by the local Catholic citizens. In 1787, the parish's Catholic parish church was built in the center of the village and still exists today and is used as a parish hall.
This church with 100 seats turned out to be too small for the growing Catholic parish of the parish of Kriegsfeld with the branches in Mörsfeld and Oberwiesen, so they first looked for a way to enlarge the existing church. After the episcopal ordinariate refused a grant due to the parsonage, which had only been built a few years earlier and had not yet been paid for, a church building association was founded in November 1908 to collect donations for the building project.
An expansion of the church to the west failed due to the necessary land acquisition, an expansion to the east stood in the way of the Protestant churchyard there. So a new plan arose to build the church behind the rectory, where the land acquisition was more straightforward. With the 37,000 marks in donations collected up to 1919, the necessary property was acquired. Shortly afterwards, the plans to build a new church were a long way off due to inflation .
In 1934 it was decided to build the new church next to the rectory, for which two barns and a residential house had to be acquired and demolished. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on August 16, 1935, and the foundation stone was laid on September 29, 1935. On September 20, 1936, Bishop Ludwig Sebastian from Speyer consecrated the church. The construction costs amounted to 80,000 marks. The church bell was melted down in 1942 during World War II . In the years 1956-1958 three new bronze bells were procured.
Up until January 1, 2016, Kriegsfeld was the seat of a parish within the Kirchheimbolanden parish community, which also included the Mörsfeld and Oberwiesen branches, each with their own branch churches. With the structural reform in the diocese of Speyer, Kriegsfeld became a branch church of the parish of St. Anna in Kirchheimbolanden.
Web links
- www.pfarrei-kirchheimbolanden.de: Church of St. Matthew