JESUIT CHURCH - LUCERNE
Baroque Beauty on the Water's Edge
The Jesuit order of Catholic priests was established in 1534 by the Spanish officer Ignatius of Loyola as a reaction to the reformation ideas spreading through Europe. In western Switzerland, the Protestantism of Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva were taking hold, but central Switzerland was remaining Catholic, with the dominant influence of Italy, where the Counter-Reformation was being advanced by Carlo Borromeo, the Jesuit archbishop of Milan. Under the initiative of Borromeo, and financed by the wealthy mayor Ludwig Pfyffer von Altishofen,the city of Lucerne provided a building, known as the Ritter Palace, where the Jesuits established a college in 1577.
The Jesuit Church of Lucerne, which stands directly across from the iconic Chapel Bridge on the edge of the River Ruess, was the first large Baroque Church built in Switzerland, begun in 1666 and consecrated in 1677, under the guidance of the Jesuit College’s Father Christoph Vogler. Designed by Italian and Austrian architects, the Jesuitenkirche is one of the most beautiful of its kind in Switzerland. The elegant Baroque architecture reflects the recovery and resurgence of the catholic influence of religious imagery to support faith.
White, gray and rose colored relief decoration embellishes the white interior, dominated by the outsized pink altar-piece, which while appearing like marble is actually a process of faux painted marble prominent in the southern Alps where actual marble was difficult to transport. A side chapel of the church is dedicated to Brother Klaus, whose life-sized statue stand clothed in a brown monk’s habit. Over the entrance door is the sculpture of patron saint of the church, the Jesuit missionary Saint Francis Xavier, also present in a recessed ceiling painting added in the 1700s. The onion domes of the bell towers were 19th Century additions.
While remaining a major tourist attraction for visitors to Lucerne, the religious life of the Jesuit Church has fallen off in the last century with the monastery college of the Jesuit order long abandoned. The collecge building is now used as an office of the cantonal adminstraion. Organ recitals and concerts are now regularly held in the lovely confines of the Jesuit Church sanctuary. © Bargain Travel Europe
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