Fulda Cathedral

About

Set at the heart of Fulda's Baroque quarter, the cathedral was once the abbey church of Fulda Abbey, a monastic foundation that lay at the centre of early Christian mission to the German lands. Its dedication to Christus Salvator carries the older monastic memory into the present.

The present church was designed by Johann Dientzenhofer and rises on the site of the earlier Ratgar Basilica, once the largest church north of the Alps. Built between 1704 and 1712 at the commission of Prince-Abbot Adalbert von Schleifras, its interior arrangement consciously echoes Saint Peter's in Rome, which Dientzenhofer had studied on a journey there.

The cathedral preserves the tomb of Saint Boniface, the eighth-century English monk-bishop whose preaching and martyrdom shaped the Christianity of central Europe. His crypt remains a major place of pilgrimage and the focal point of the diocese's spiritual life.

In 1752 the abbey church was raised to a cathedral when the Diocese of Fulda was erected, and although the abbey itself was dissolved in 1802, the church has continued without interruption as the bishop's seat. It survived a tower fire in 1905 and damage from the air raids of the Second World War, reopening after restoration in 1954.

History

The Ratgar Basilica that once stood on the site was raised in the ninth century as the church of Fulda Abbey, founded by Saint Sturm at the direction of Saint Boniface in 744. After Boniface's martyrdom in 754, the basilica became his burial place and a centre of pilgrimage. By the early eighteenth century, the older church was deemed inadequate, and Prince-Abbot Adalbert von Schleifras commissioned Dientzenhofer's new Baroque building, dedicated on 15 August 1712.

The diocese was created in 1752, raising the church to cathedral status. The abbey was dissolved in 1802 during the wider secularisation, but the bishopric continued. Pope John Paul II offered an open-air Mass on the cathedral square in 1980 for the 1225th anniversary of Boniface's death.

Significance

Fulda Cathedral is the most important Bonifatian shrine in Christendom, drawing pilgrims to the tomb of the saint whose ministry christianised much of central Europe. Each year the German bishops gather in Fulda for their plenary assembly, weaving the cathedral into the life of the wider Catholic Church in Germany.