Qualla: Gerleve Abbey

Gerleve Abbey: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kaʁstn Disk/Cat, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The Wermelt family gave a farm. That was how it started - not a royal foundation or a bishop's decree, but a Westphalian farming family handing over their land in 1899 so a small group of Benedictine monks from Beuron Archabbey could try to build a monastery between Coesfeld and Billerbeck. The monks took over the cows. They sang Mass in a small farmhouse chapel. Five years later, the west wing was finished and Gerleve was an abbey. A century after that, the choir of monks here would be famous across Germany for one thing: how they sing.

Read more: Gerleve Abbey on Qualla

Image: kaʁstn Disk/Cat | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Gerleve Abbey: The Beuron Sound

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Gerleve belongs to the Beuronese Congregation, the same family of houses that grew out of Beuron Archabbey in the Swabian Jura. Beuron is associated, in German Catholic memory, with the recovery of Gregorian chant - the long, breathing, unaccompanied lines of medieval plainsong t...

Read more: Gerleve Abbey on Qualla

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Gerleve Abbey: Pacifist Activity and Destructive Criticism

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. On Sunday, 13 July 1941, the SS arrived and ordered the monks to leave. The Gauleiter, a man named Meyer, told whoever asked that the Gerlever monks had been found guilty of 'pacifist activity and destructive criticism' - which was, in his view, a polite way of describing what th...

Read more: Gerleve Abbey on Qualla

Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gerleve Abbey: The Maternity Years

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit W.Strickling, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Hitler Youth took the guest house. The Nazis put a maternity facility into the cloister - part of the Lebensborn-adjacent push to produce German children for the war. More than 800 babies were born in Gerleve between 1941 and the end of the war. In February 1945, with bombs f...

Read more: Gerleve Abbey on Qualla

Image: W.Strickling | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gerleve Abbey: The Long Roll of Abbots

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. After Molitor came Pius Buddenborg, who held the abbacy from 1948 to 1976 and rebuilt what the regime had broken. After him: Clemens Schmeing, then Pius Engelbert (a notable historian of Benedictine monasticism), then Laurentius Schlieker from 2006, and since 2020, Andreas Werner...

Read more: Gerleve Abbey on Qualla

Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gerleve Abbey: Visiting the Hours

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horst J. Meuter, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today, Gerleve still keeps the Divine Office - the eight daily services that structure Benedictine life from before dawn to after dark. The Ludgerirast retreat house, repurposed and reopened after the war, is once again where people come when they want a few quiet days in the abb...

Read more: Gerleve Abbey on Qualla

Image: Horst J. Meuter | CC BY-SA 4.0