St. Maximilian Kolbe (Cologne)
St. Maximilian Kolbe is a Catholic branch church in the Cologne district of Finkenberg , which was built in 1977 according to plans by the architect Hans Schilling and consecrated in September 1978 . The church is under the patronage of Maximilian Kolbe, who is venerated as a martyr .
History and construction
The newly built settlement area between the Eil and Gremberghoven districts of Porz , which was only to become the new Finkenberg district in 2007, had had a Catholic (and Protestant) pastoral team since 1971, who organized community life with church services in a provisional, so-called “church shop”. In 1974 the mother community of St. Michael in Porz-Eil commissioned the architects Hans Schilling, Heinz Schwarz and Edmund Fuchs to plan a community center; the vicariate general's building permit was granted in 1976.
As the foundation stone , which was laid on May 8, 1977, the congregation received a piece of Cologne Cathedral from master builder Arnold Wolff , and in the following year, on September 30, 1978, the new church was consecrated by Auxiliary Bishop Augustinus Frotz . St. Maximilian Kolbe gained independence from the mother parish in February 1978, but the archbishopric began making efforts as early as 1991 to merge four parishes in Porz due to the shortage of priests . In 2001 the reorganization of the parishes was carried out and St. Maximilian Kolbe became a branch church of the entire parish of the same name.
Building description
As the first Catholic community center in St. Maximilian Kolbe, the church and other common rooms are combined in a common building . In close proximity to the Evangelical Hope Church and the Church of a Free Christian Congregation, it stands on the so-called church hill above a lower street and is connected to the residential buildings opposite by a pedestrian bridge.
The entire building is made of bricks. While the polygonal church building with an asymmetrical floor plan and the set octagonal tower rise very steeply and completely closed towards the deep lane, its roof slopes down towards the "hilltop" to storey height. Here the entrance area is rather reserved in a niche between the surrounding one- and two-story buildings of the community center.
The interior is brightly lit through narrow side windows along the sloping roof and a striped window in the choir area. It has a wooden ceiling with battens running across the slope of the ceiling. The windows are clear and have a view of the sky on one side and the skyscraper on the other. The room is structured in many ways; so four sides of the set tower protrude into the room; this offers a niche for the tabernacle and access to the weekday chapel. The altar area is at ground level and can be seated from all sides.
Furnishing
The furnishings are deliberately kept modest - probably also due to the provisional early years of the community. The altar table, designed by Egino Weinert in 1972/1973, was transferred from the “church shop” to the new church. It is designed with four motifs from the New Testament .
A large wall niche above the altar is adorned - only in summer - with a wall hanging that Monika Möller and Monika Jilke designed and women from the congregation carried out silk painting for two years until 1987 . It shows the seventh day of creation, when God rested from his work ( Gen 2.1–3 EU ).
A way of the cross running along the altar wall to the left window was created in 1981 by Dieter Valk and Alfred Kupper.
The Marienkapelle, which in 1978 was equipped with windows by Käthe Bartels , a design in free composition, contains a copy of the black Madonna of Czestochowa .
A special feature is the paviment , the tiled floor, designed by Klaus Balke (or: Paul Bahlke): its design extends beyond the area of the church to the parish rooms and combines leaf and flower motifs with geometric shapes and - Bicycles. At the point where the picture of the patron saint Maximilian Kolbe hangs, the tiled floor is interrupted by a rectangular concrete " incrustation ". This is to commemorate the floor of the hunger bunker of the Auschwitz concentration camp , where the Polish priest sacrificed himself for a fellow inmate and was murdered. On top of it lies a black wooden cross from Zduńska Wola , Kolbe's birthplace, which came in its place in 1988 as a gift from former concentration camp inmates.
A bell with strike tone c 1 from 1521, cast by Jochim Ingermann (or: anonymous) came in 1982 on loan from the Protestant community in the tower when they laid the foundation stone for their Church of Hope. It comes from Wojęcino, Poland, and is rung for both Protestant and Catholic services on the church hill.
A new organ that has been planned for a long time, which is a constructive symbiosis of the existing Seifert organ with an older organ from Radevormwald, was inaugurated in 2002.
Web links
- Forschungsstelle Glasmalerei des 20. Jh. EV with illustrations and explanations of the windows
- Website of the parish with a detailed history and picture gallery
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g The history of the parish of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Finkenberg. In: st-maximilian-kolbe.de. 2012, accessed April 14, 2020 .
- ↑ a b c d Helmut Fußbroich, Dierk Holthausen: Architectural Guide Cologne: Sacred Buildings after 1900 . 1st edition. Bachem, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-7616-1683-X , p. 250-251 .
- ↑ a b c d Carsten Schmalstieg: Sankt Maximilian Kolbe . In: Manfred Becker-Huberti, Günter A. Menne (Ed.): Churches in Cologne. The churches of the Catholic and Protestant communities in Cologne. Bachem, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-7616-1731-3 , p. 126 .
- ↑ Cologne-Finkenberg, Catholic Church of St. Maximilian Kolbe. In: glasmalerei-ev.net. Forschungsstelle Glasmalerei des 20 Jahrhundert eV, July 8, 2008, accessed on April 14, 2020 .
- ^ Gerhard Hoffs: Bells of Catholic churches in Cologne . Cologne 1985, p. 648 ( archive.org [PDF]).
annotation
- ↑ In 2004, Fußbroich mentions two manuals and 13 registers for a “projected” organ, but it is not entirely clear whether this corresponds to the organ's final state.
Coordinates: 50 ° 53 '50 " N , 7 ° 3' 49.2" E