St. Mechthild (Magdeburg)

St. Mechthild , named after the blessed Mechthild von Magdeburg , is the Roman Catholic church in Magdeburg 's Neustädter Feld district . It belongs to the parish of St. Johannes Bosco with its seat at St. Agnes , in the Magdeburg deanery of the Magdeburg diocese .

Exterior view

window

history

After the new development areas of Kannenstieg , Neustädter Feld and Neustädter See had been built in the north of Magdeburg in the mid-1970s , the desire for a Catholic church arose because around 1400 of the around 48,000 residents were Catholic. From 1975 a deacon worked as the first pastor for the new building areas.

As part of a special church building program of the GDR , the construction of the Sankt-Mechthild-Kirche in the north of Magdeburg began in 1978 with financial support from the Bonifatiuswerk , Paderborn . In 1982 an independent parish vicarie was set up and the foundation stone of the church was laid. On September 16, 1984 Church and Community Center by Bishop was John Brown , then apostolic administrator of Magdeburg, dedicated . A relic of Saint Burchard I of Halberstadt was embedded in the altar of the church .

On April 7, 1991 the parish vicarie was elevated to a parish. On March 1, 2006 the association of municipalities Magdeburg-Nord was established, to which the parish of St. Mechthild belonged from then on. On November 28, 2010, today's parish of St. Johannes Bosco was founded from the community , to which the church has belonged ever since.

Building

The church and community center are designed as a compact octagonal clinker building with a hipped copper roof. The church includes a playground, the parish house and a nurses' house, as well as a garage complex. The organ builder Gerhard Kühn from Merseburg designed the organ with 16 registers and 1227 sounding pipes .

The community center has a basement. The Don Bosco Center, founded in 1993, is located here . Children and young people, most of them without a denomination, have found a point of contact with the Don Bosco Sisters. With St. Adalbert there is an almost identical, but no cellar, octagonal hall church in the south of the city.

Works of art

The large altar windows were made by the Berlin company Lehmann according to a design by the Schönebeck artist Christof Grüger . Thematically, the windows depict the heavenly Jerusalem (center) and the burning bush (right-hand window with integrated tabernacle ).

The east-facing church offers 150 seats. The altar , tabernacle , chandelier and reliefs on the organ gallery were made in bronze by Jürgen Sulberg from Olsberg. The reliefs on the organ gallery depict scenes from the life of the blessed Mechthild von Magdeburg.

The interior of the church also includes a statue of the Virgin Mary, next to which sacrificial candles can be placed, and a picture of St. John Bosco .