Silent Night
The little Austrian town of Oberndorf is situated on a sharp bend of the Salzach River, downstream from Salzburg. At this place is a tiny memorial chapel dedicated to Joseph Mohr, a curate, and Franz Xaver Gruber, a music teacher, who created the world famous song ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’. The idea for the song came from Mohr and his idea was to write a song for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. In 1818 he wrote the lines and his close friend Gruber wrote the melody and it was heard for the first time in the parish church of St Nikolaus in Obersdorf. The rest is history. In 1899 the church was demolished as a result of flood damage and the Mohr and Gruber Memorial Chapel stands in its place. Both men are depicted in stained glass inside the chapel.
The Silent Night Chapel
Wernerkapelle
The ruined Wernerkapelle in Barcharach in the
Middle Rhine area of Germany
has a dark secret. Werner was a local
boy whose body was found nearby and investigations concluded that he has been
brutally murdered. Local Jews were
suspected of the crime and of using the boys blood for their rituals and Werner
was regarded as a saint by the local people. Donations by pilgrims to the site
contributed towards the construction of the Gothic chapel which commenced in
1294. It was destroyed by war in 1689
since which time the ruins have been protected as an ancient monument.
The Wernerkapelle
The Holy
Blood
The most important shrine in Brugge in Belgium , The
Basilica of the Holy Blood, is tucked away in a corner of the square known as
The Burg. It is named after a holy relic
which found its way to Brugge in the Middle Ages, namely a few drops of blood
and water washed from the body of Christ by Joseph of Arimathea, contained in a
small phial. The phial is kept in the tiny treasury in a large silver
tabernacle.
The Basilica of the Holy Blood
The Secret Church
In 1661 Jan
Hartman a merchant from Germany ,
bought three adjacent houses one of which faces onto the canal at No 40
Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam .
Hartman was a Catholic and at that time Catholic worship was officially banned
in Amsterdam .
Between 1661 and 1663, Hartman built a clandestine church across the attics of
his three houses – an amazing church now known as Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder
(Our Lord in the attic) and one of very few such churches still in existence.
It remained in use
until 1887 when the Great St Nicholas church was built nearby.
The Secret Church
Little
Flower of Jesus
Building
of the huge hilltop basilica at Lisieux in France, visited by some 100,000 pilgrims each
year, commenced as late as 1926, a year after the canonisation of its patron St
Thérèse of the Child Jesus, and was completed in 1954 as her shrine.
Known
as ‘The Little Flower of Jesus’, Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin, the youngest
of nine children, was born in 1873 into a very pious family. She was a frail child and at the age of nine she nearly died, but a
vision of Our Lady smiling at her, effected an immediate and complete
cure. At the age of 13 years,
Thérèse and her father began a campaign for
her to enter a convent before the normal age of 16 years and she was
subsequently admitted to the Carmel convent as Thérèse de l’enfant Jesus in 1888
when she was fifteen. She was ordered by
the Mother Superior to try her hand at writing which resulted in her
autobiography, ‘The story of a Soul’, the most famous passage being fusion with
Jesus in the form of a wedding invitation.
Racked by consumption, the ‘little flower’ died in 1898, at the age of
just twenty five. Following her
canonisation she was made a doctor of the Church in 1997
Paratrooper
John Steele
The little town of Ste-Mère-Eglise in Normandy is close to Utah Beach ,
where American forces landed on 6th
June, 1944 during the invasion of Normandy in World War 11. Airborne troops were used to secure inland
positions and amongst the 13,000 men,
Paratrooper John Steele dropped from the sky near the Ste-Mère-Eglise
and gained lasting fame when he actually landed on the church. Steele’s parachute got caught on the parapet
of the church tower and he hung there helplessly feigning death before he was
eventually taken prisoner. A dummy
paratrooper still hangs from the church tower to this day.
St Mere Eglise Church
There is a fine stained glass window inside the church which depicts the event.
St Cado
The
tiny French village of St Cado is on a circular islet on the
Etel estuary on Brittany ’s
Atlantic coast, an idyllic place connected to the mainland by a single stone
bridge.
The
Romanesque church is dedicated to the island’s patron saint, St Cado. This Celtic monk is said to have been able to
cure deafness in all who placed their ears against his stone bed which is to be
found inside the church.
Legend
has it that St Cado persuaded the Devil to build the bridge to link the island
to the mainland in return for the first soul to travel across. It is said that St Cado sent a cat across the
bridge before anyone used it.
The Church of the rock
Temppeliaukio Church is a Lutheran Church in Helsinki. Known as the Church of the Rock, it was consecrated in 1969.
The interior was excavated and built directly out of solid rock and is lit by a glazed dome. The rough rock surface gives excellent acoustics.
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