Immaculate Conception (Wernigerode)

Partial view of the church

The Immaculate Conception Church , usually called St. Marien for short , is the Catholic church in Wernigerode , a town in the Harz district in Saxony-Anhalt . It is the parish church of the parish “St. Bonifatius ”, in the Halberstadt deanery of the Magdeburg diocese . The church, named after the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God , is located at Sägemühlengasse 18.

history

With the introduction of the Reformation in the 16th century, the population and the churches in the Harz became Evangelical Lutheran . While Count Botho zu Stolberg and Wernigerode remained faithful to the Catholic faith until his death in 1538, his sons adopted the Lutheran faith.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Catholics who had fled the French Revolution came to Wernigerode. Among them was Abbé Joseph Hugues, who looked after the few Catholics living in the county of Wernigerode from 1796 until his death . The then ruling Protestant Count Christian Friedrich zu Stolberg-Wernigerode allowed Abbé Hugues to take up residence in the Wasmus tower of his castle and to set up a Catholic chapel there.

After the death of Abbé Hugues in 1822, the St. Catherine's Church in Halberstadt, around 20 kilometers away, was the closest Catholic church to Wernigerode. From 1869 on, the county of Wernigerode was assigned to the Halberstadt parish as a mission area .

After Catholic workers settled in Wernigerode in the second half of the 19th century, Catholic services were occasionally held in Wernigerode from 1871 onwards. Initially in various mundane rooms, including in the hall of the town hall. In 1879 a plot of land was purchased on Grünen Strasse, opposite the Protestant St. John's Church . An emergency chapel was set up in the stable building there, the clergy initially came from St. Catherine's Church in Halberstadt. In 1895 the Diocese of Paderborn , to which Wernigerode belonged at the time, sent Theodor Schlechter, the first vicar to Wernigerode. After the Catholics received a major inheritance to build a church in 1896, planning began for today's church. The number of Catholics who belonged to the catchment area of the emergency chapel had increased to around 500 by 1903, plus summer guests and seasonal workers.

In 1904 the church building site was acquired, it is located on the Harzquerbahn , southeast of the city center of Wernigerode. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on March 31, 1905. On Whit Monday , June 12th , the foundation stone was laid by Franz Schauerte , Episcopal Commissioner in Magdeburg. The benediction followed on July 1, 1906, also by Schauerte. In 1906/07 the rectory was built. On July 1, 1909, the Wernigerode branch parish was elevated to a parish vicarie. The church was consecrated on June 13, 1913 by the Paderborn bishop Karl Joseph Schulte . When the church was being built, Adolf Ostendorf (1878–1964) was parish vicar in Wernigerode.

In 1924 the gas lighting in the church was switched to electric light , and in 1927 the church got its first heating. In the course of the following decades, various renovations and redesigns of the interior were carried out, but the church was always spared from war damage.

On January 1, 1944, the parish vicarie was elevated to a parish . After the Second World War , the number of Catholics in Wernigerode increased due to the influx of refugees and displaced persons from the eastern regions of the German Empire . From 1972 the chancel was redesigned after the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council , and in 1977 a new altar was consecrated by Johannes Braun .

On July 1, 2007, the foundation of the Catholic communities in Elbingerode , Hesse , Ilsenburg , Osterwieck , Wasserleben , Wernigerode and Zilly . On May 3, 2010, today's parish “St. Boniface ”. The Brocken , the highest mountain in Northern Germany , also belongs to it . In 2011 a census showed that of the almost 34,000 inhabitants of Wernigerode, only 2.6% belonged to the Roman Catholic Church.

Architecture and equipment

The neo-Romanesque basilica has the basic shape of a Latin cross and is equipped with two 28 meter high towers on the west side. The building was designed by the local architect Wilhelm Bruns († 1928), who was himself a member of the church council . Arnold Güldenpfennig brought the plans to completion. The church is around 250 meters above sea level and offers over 200 seats.

Two reliefs under the organ gallery today come from the original altar of the church; they depict two miracles of Jesus : the feeding of the five thousand and the Lord's Supper . Under the organ gallery there is also the confessional , as well as depictions of the Holy Family and Saints Anthony of Padua and Jude Thaddeus . The organ was built in 1906 by Eggert Orgelbau-Anstalt , it was later changed several times. The Way of the Cross was designed as a mosaic application by Emil Pischel in the 1970s . In the apses to the left and right of the chancel there is a statue of the Virgin Mary from 1971, in front of which sacrificial candles can be placed, as well as the baptismal font . Three stained glass windows in the chancel date from the early days of the church, they show Saints Barbara of Nicomedia , Mary (mother of Jesus) and Hubertus of Liège . The tabernacle from the 1990s is a work by Werner Nickel from Nienburg (Saale) . Of the three original bells made by the bell foundry Petit & Gebr. Edelbrock , only the smallest bell, weighing 330 kg, has survived to this day; the other bells had to be given in during the First World War . The two other bells that exist today were made in 1956 by the bell foundry in Apolda .