Kloster Schönstatt

Schönstatt takes its name from a document of 1143 that described the place as "eyne schöne stat", a beautiful spot, where Augustinian nuns then had a house with a late Romanesque basilica and a small cemetery chapel. The Pallottines bought the old convent grounds in 1901 and built a mission school that became the Vinzenz Pallotti university. Between 1912 and 1919 their spiritual director, Josef Kentenich, gathered a Marian sodality in that cemetery chapel; from 1914 it grew into the international Schoenstatt Movement, and the chapel became its shrine. The later buildings answer the pilgrim traffic — the fortress-like Adoration Church of 1968, where Kentenich is buried, and a tent-shaped pilgrimage church of 1999 holding more than 1,300. Music belongs to the ordinary life of these rooms.