By Pia Fredebeul
The Saint Hedwig Cathedral in Berlin-Mitte has been being renovated since 2017. Now the next milestone on the way to reopening will take place in a year: the consecration of the new altar.
Wednesday evening, exactly 250 years after the first consecration of Hedwig’s Church, the new altar was consecrated in St. Hedwig’s Cathedral on Bebelplatz.
“The altar is shaped as a hemisphere and therefore fits perfectly with the rest of the church’s rotunda,” says Stefan Förner (58), spokesman for the Archdiocese of Berlin. But that is not the only special feature of the divine table. “The altar was made of living stones.”
This is what Saint Hedwig Cathedral will look like when it opens in just under a year Photo: Nightnurse
Following a call from the community a year ago, believers brought or sent over 1,000 stones from various places in the archdiocese to Berlin. Included are parts from the Berlin Wall, Israel, Rome, Lithuania, Ukraine and many other places. They were united as an altar using a stone cast.
The new altar is in the center of the cathedral, directly under the cloud opening in the dome Photo: David Heerde
The history and construction of the church are explained in more detail Photo: David Heerde
Leo Zogmaier (74) from Vienna is responsible for the artistic design of the cathedral. He came up with the idea of using stones from the community for the altar. “The main theme of the diocese is the community,” says the artist. “That’s why we wanted to design an altar that the members of the community would build together.”
Around 100 guests were invited to the altar consecration in the evening, including the German nuncio and the bishop of Vilnius. During the ceremony, a silver box containing a special relic, a bone fragment of St. Hedwig, was placed in the altar. In about a year, St. Hedwig’s Cathedral will finally be ceremonially reopened to everyone.
The cathedral was consecrated on November 1, 1773 as the first Catholic church after the Reformation in Protestant Prussia Photo: Ralf Lutter