Polish traditions in Catholic churches of the Ruhr area

Churches as witnesses to Ruhr area history
 

The “Ruhr area” is an extensive mining district in western Germany between the Ruhr and Lippe rivers in the centre of North Rhine-Westphalia. It only emerged in the second half of the 19th century when the industrialisation of coal mining and steel manufacture transformed this once rural region into a gigantic urban landscape within a few decades. From then on, pit frames and blast furnaces competed with traditional church towers to dominate as landmarks. [ . ] 

Among the masses of immigrant working-class families, people with Polish as their native language formed the largest national population group. Before the First World War, more than 300,000 Catholic Poles who had mostly been born in the Prussian provinces of Posen, Silesia and West Prussia lived in the Ruhr area. There were also 150,000 Protestant Masurians from the province East Prussia. Companies built numerous worker settlements, known as “colonies”, to accommodate them. [ . ] Town centres expanded around the mines and ironworks with more residential housing, administrative buildings, businesses, schools, and churches. [ ., ., . ]

The places of worship in the industrial area reflect the history of the Ruhr region in a variety of ways. In some of the mining villages, the enormous influx of religious immigrants meant that the small churches dating back to the Middle Ages needed to be extended. In Dortmund-Kirchlinde the old bell tower was torn down and replaced with a monumental church tower that was connected to a sweeping neo-Gothic nave on the other side. [ ., . ] Clay bricks were the main construction material in many new buildings. [ ., . ] They often came from mine brickworks and were fired from marl clay which had to be extracted as a waste product from coal mining. In Protestant sacred buildings, steel pillars are often found that were likely donated to the parish by neighbouring ironworks. [ ., . ]

Catholicism initially favoured sprawling church spaces that, alongside the central nave for the main services, also included divided-off areas for private piety and the worshipping of saints. However, in the early 20th century, it is noticeable that the interior spaces were increasingly designed to be more open. Now the wide, high nave accommodated many pews and both sides of the nave were reduced to the function of narrow side passages. [ ., . ] This understanding of space can – according to pastor Johannes van Acken from Gladbeck in his “Christocentric” architecture theory – be understood as a reaction to a dramatic situation in the Ruhr area where the parish clergy was challenged by a dissonant demographic around 1900: “Large masses of a rapidly merging population, often of different nationalities, sometimes with less of a religious background should learn, detached from religious customs from their home, to feel that they belong in the places of worship as members of a parish and children of one Father. The importance of this vibrant sense of community and belonging for religious life in the new district speaks for bringing the parish together in a more unified church space.” Using the example of the Holy Cross Church in Gladbeck-Butendorf, Acken explained that a Mass celebrated together in this ideal space could help to reduce national tensions among the faithful: The “expansion of the central church space” explicitly took place with the intention that “the altar be the centre of attention, the heart, and point of sight for everyone ideally.” [ ., ., Quotation [freely translated]: van Acken, pp. 8.]