Waldsassen - Pilgrimage Church of the Holy Trinity (Kappl)

The Church of the Holy Trinity (Kappl) on Glasberg near Münchenreuth stands on the former monastery grounds of the Cistercian Abbey of Waldsassen, about an hour's walk from the monastery.

According to tradition, the origins of the church and the pilgrimage date back to the founding of the Waldsassen monastery around 1133. At that time, the lay brothers of the monastery are said to have grazed their herds of cattle here. For devotions and prayers, an image of the Holy Trinity was attached to the trunk of a tree, which was soon venerated as miraculous. This led to pilgrimages, which the monastery supported by building a chapel that protected not only the image but also the pilgrims and pilgrim women who came in ever increasing numbers.

Under Abbot Daniel (1161-1194) it was decided to build a worthy pilgrimage church. It was later destroyed in the Hussite Wars (around 1430) and in the Landshut War of Succession (1504), but was rebuilt in both cases.

The introduction of the Protestant Reformation in Waldsassen by the Electoral Palatinate, which began in 1556, not only marked the first secularization of the Waldsassen monastery, but also the temporary end of the pilgrimage to Kappel. When the Upper Palatinate was recatholized by the Elector of Bavaria during the Thirty Years' War, Kappl was already in ruins.

It was only after the recatholicization of the Upper Palatinate in 1626 that new life began to awaken here, although it was still hampered by the consequences of the Thirty Years' War, whose hordes also ravaged the countryside around Waldsassen several times. The documented healing of the sick in 1644 at the 'ruined chapel' caused a great stir and led to the building of a new pilgrimage chapel in 1645-1648 on the initiative of the priest Johann Anton Mazaroth. This little church with its eastern tower is depicted on the main altarpiece of the present chapel. The high altar was donated in 1652 by the chief steward of Waldsassen, Colonel Augustin von Fritsch.

The altarpiece depicts the Holy Trinity hovering over the newly built pilgrimage chapel. This altarpiece is reused in the new high altar of today's Kappel, built at the beginning of the 18th century. The chapel depicted in it, dating from 1648, has a short nave with a choir tower with an onion banjo and lantern. Next to it is an inn, mentioned as early as 1560 and forming an indispensable part of the pilgrimage site.

The Thirty Years' War ended in 1648.

In 1669, the Waldsassen monastic estate was returned to the Cistercian Order. Abbot Martin Dallmayr of Fürstenfeld took over the monastery estate for a large ransom and ran the monastery as a priory. As early as 1661, three priests from Fürstenfeld Abbey were already working there under the direction of the superior, Father Nivard Christoph. The Cistercians also administered the surrounding parishes, only Münchenreuth and the pilgrimage site at Kappl were administered by the lay priest Paulus Eckhardt from 1670 to 1698.

In the peacetime after the Thirty Years' War, pilgrimages increased strongly. The parish priest Paul Eckhart therefore initiated the building of a new larger church on the same site. He found help from the superior of the Waldsassen monastery, Nivard Christoph.

From 1681, he was in charge of the construction of the new buildings of the Waldsassen monastery, which were designed and built by the Prague builder Abraham Leuthner with the polisher Georg Dientzenhofer. Georg quickly gained the trust of the monastery's superior, Nivard Christoph. Therefore, when the planning for the new building of the Kappel was to begin in 1684, it was Georg Dientzenhofer who was awarded the contract. The inspiration for the depiction of the Holy Trinity in the church plan may have originally come from Father Paulus Eckhardt.

The project was approved by the Regensburg Ordinariate in April 1685, construction began in May and the foundation stone was laid on 12 July 1685.

The construction team of Georg Dientzenhofer built an extraordinary building with a dome of three cones and three towers within a few years. Only basic information about the building is known. In 1686, the master carpenter Johann Schenkl of Waldershof erected an ingenious roof truss. The vaults followed in 1687 at the latest. Only now has the chapel building from 1648, which was still standing in the middle of the interior of the new church, been demolished.

By leaving the previous building in place, the tradition of pilgrimages, a practice common in many new pilgrimage churches at the time, did not have to be interrupted. After the rough construction was completed and the main scaffolding was removed, the existing altars were temporarily placed in the new church interior. The consecration of the building followed in 1689.

Before the completion of the building on 2 February 1689, the master builder Georg Dientzenhofer died at the age of only 47.

In 1690, Albert Hausner was elected the first abbot of the now independent Waldsassen Abbey. Father Nivard Christoph returned to Fürstenfeld. Father Paulus Eckhardt died in 1698.

In 1698, Abbot Albert Hausner had fifteen rosary stops set up on the road from Waldsassen to the pilgrimage church.

The altar antependia made of gilded and silver-plated stele were supplied in 1715 by Johann Georg Göhringer from Cheb, two new altar leaves in 1716 probably by Johann Gebhard from Prüfening.

During the third abbot Eugen around 1730, the abbot commissioned a young Czech painter Anton Smichaus to paint the previously white interior.

In 1734 Abbot Eugen ordered a larger organ from the organ builders Franz Fassmann and Johann Adam Pleyer.

In 1803, Waldsassen Abbey was taken over by the Bavarian Electorate as part of the secularization process and the monastery was dissolved. The pilgrimage church escaped demolition because the small rural parish of Münchenreuth and the newly founded "Kappl Pilgrimage Church Foundation" found a sponsor with a commitment to maintain the church. At the same time, however, the struggle against pilgrimages within the church as a result of the Enlightenment led to the near extinction of pilgrimages. They did not flourish again until the second half of the 19th century.

On the night of 3 March 1880, the neighbouring inn burned down. The flames spread to the shingled roof of the Kappel. The fire spread to the roof trusses of the church and the cupola of the church tower. The vaults were preserved.

By October 1880, damage to the interior had been repaired. The windows were re-glazed with stained glass windows popular at the time. Only the painting of the vault by Anton Smichaus did not resist the fire. The extensive destruction of the oil painting was probably not caused by the heat, but by inadequate protection from rain until new roofing was installed. The interior decoration and wall paintings were spared. The murals by Anton Smichaus no longer exist today.

The first restoration of the church after the fire took place in 1903-1905. With the new pastor Leopold Witt, the controversial phase of repainting the dome began in 1920. While Witt wanted a new painting "that would cost little and appeal to the peasants", the preservationists advocated a painting appropriate to the building. It was only after the transfer of a priest who had arbitrarily had the dome of God the Father painted in 1928 and had the plaster on two of the domes scraped off, that Oskar Martin-Amorbach could be commissioned to repaint the three domes in 1931.

After the Second World War, restoration work piled up. In some cases, the sins of earlier restorations were rectified. For example, in the first interior restoration, completed in 1960, "style-defying components" were removed, including stained glass from 1880. The most recent restoration of the exterior took place in 2001-2004. The organ was restored in 2018-2019.

The trinity, an equilateral triangle or three interlocking circles, is the symbol of the Holy Trinity. This principle was the basis for the design of the Kappl building, which was supposedly given to the master builder Georg Dientzenhofer by Father Paulus Eckhart. However, the idea of symbolically translating the idea of the Trinity into a church with three domed cones was already proposed in 1675 by the parish priest of Kulmain for the pilgrimage church in Armesberg, a seven-hour walk from Münchenreuth.

Georg Dientzenhofer took his cue from trinitarian symbolism and built three conchs above the trefoil-shaped ground plan, enclosing an equilateral triangle. He placed three round towers in the outer corners. Externally, the building was enclosed by a perimeter single-storey corridor with a single-skin roof.

In the three-meter double-skinned enclosing mass of the concha, Georg Dientzenhofer created three room-height niches in each concha as a negative form. In the three central niches the main altars are placed freely in front of the outer walls and facing the centre of the room. The six side niches are divided by galleries, accessed from the round towers. Below the galleries, in the narrow side niches facing the main altars, are more modest side altars. The interior is divided by double pilasters between the niches. Dientzenhofer placed three full columns in the seams of the three conchos, recessed into the concave bulge. The interior is lit by semicircular windows at gallery level in each of the nine niches. Each of the cones also has a top lantern.

From the outside, the building looks extremely picturesque. In addition to the addition of curves, the three tapering onion domes with lanterns on the circular towers and the lanterns of the three conchos, which are also topped by an onion dome, contribute to this.

The idea of the Trinity also appears in the church furnishings. The interior is made up of three conchos arranged around an imaginary equilateral triangle. Three hemispheres arch over the three altars and three columns stand at the three corners of the plan.

The three ceiling paintings were created by Oskar Martin-Amorbach in 1934-1940 in an imitated Baroque style after the original Baroque frescoes were destroyed by fire in 1880. The paintings depict God the Father, God the Son and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The frescoes are completely contrary to the understanding of the Baroque.

Following the internal architecture of the Kappel, Martin-Amorbach designed monumental Baroque-like pictorial spaces, which, however, like the figures acting in them, appear stiff and cold. On the one hand, this reflects his study of early Italian Renaissance painting and early Christian fresco painting, from which he developed a monumental and large-scale style. On the other hand, the stiff, sharply outlined and barely shaded figures are influenced by the 'new materiality'.

Although the frescoes in the dome are a good example of the monumental painting of the 1830s, they are incompatible with the Baroque space of the Chapel. This is not due to their content. Martin-Amorbach even brilliantly translates the Baroque subject of the previous painting into modern content. However, everything that is characteristic of Baroque painting is missing, the chiaroscuro effect, the dynamism of figures and colours, the "sotto-in-sù" with Baroque illusionism that only massive earthly scenes in domes under a clear sky populated by saints know.

The eastern main altar is characterised by its design as the main altar and forms the main west-east axis with the organ opposite. Its reredos is a four-column edicule with an extension. It is executed in reddish stucco marble and is similar in colour to the high altar at Waldsassen. The reredos and tabernacle of the high altar, but especially the figural sculpture, are the best works of unfortunately unknown masters from around 1700.

The other two high altars are simplified copies of the high altar, perhaps made by local altarpieces around 1715. Unlike the high altar, these are two-column marbled wooden versions. Their altarpieces depict the Holy Family (on the north altar) and the Assumption (on the south altar).

The pulpit is also of high artistic quality. The thick gilded acanthus carvings on the basket frame the relief images of the Evangelists, while on the sounding board we find their fully embossed, gold-framed symbols and, above, the symbol of the Trinity accompanied by angels and putti.

The three-manual organ with twelve stops is the only device in the Chapel whose masters are still known. The west column holds an organ swallow's nest made by the organ builders of Elbogen. It rests on a fan-shaped bracket with the column at its centre. The entrances are connected to the side niche galleries. It is built over the existing positive of the first furnishing of 1690. While the sections of the chancel niche show Renaissance ornamentation, the sculptural treatment of the organ and its white and gold fittings are early Rococo.

The pilgrimage church of the Holy Trinity is today administered by the parish of St. Emmeram in Münchenreuth.