On March 30, 1121, Pope Calixtus II signed the deed of foundation for the expiatory monastery of St. Peter and Paul in Beuerberg, Upper Bavaria.

Nine hundred years later, the ceremony falls victim to a pandemic called Corona.

It should be made up for next year.

But you don't have to wait that long, because the exhibition “Commune 1121” has been open in the former monastery since Whitsunday. It deals with the Augustinian canons and their communal way of life.

A topic as relevant today as it was then, it negotiates the question: How do we want to live together?

Hannes Hintermeier

Responsible editor for the features section.

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    Seven years ago, the last Salesians, who had run the monastery for 168 years, left the small town south of Wolfratshausen, not far from the southern tip of Lake Starnberg. The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising did the right thing by renouncing the usual processing method and not having a seminar hotel, senior residence or wellness temple "developed" from it. Instead, she handed the facility over to the in-house diocesan museum, along with its inventory, liturgical implements, bed linen, crucifixes, crockery, library, garden and tailoring. Its director, Christoph Kurzeder, was a king without a country from 2013, because the museum on the Freisinger Domberg was closed that year.After a nine-year general renovation, it will reopen at Pentecost 2022. But Kurzeder used his chance wisely: In a first exhibition that dealt with life in the monastery, he made Beuerberg Monastery accessible.

    They work for the kingdom of God on earth

    And since the exhibition "Klausur" developed into a crowd puller, an exhibition followed every year from then on, which confronted aspects of monastic life with contemporary issues.

    At the same time, parts of the monastery were upgraded in terms of monument preservation.

    Beuerberg cannot and does not want to be a museum in the strict sense, as there is a lack of security technology and air conditioning.

    However, it is precisely the authentic charm that has brought the house regular customers, including people who quarrel with the church, but who experience the aura of a spiritual place here relaxed.

    In this respect, as if by a small miracle, Beuerberg once again became fertile ground for a church that doubted itself.

    They work for the kingdom of God on earth: The Augustinian Canons are a pastoral-oriented order whose members work as parish priests to return to the monastery in the evening.

    The gentlemen set great store by permeability to the world, and that also benefited the village of Beuerberg during the nearly seven hundred years of his first life.

    Until the secularization of 1803, many families worked for around a dozen monks, more than twenty never lived there.

     "It is not good that the person is alone"

    How this community works is shown in a film in the exhibition, which, like other interviews, can also be seen on the Diocesan Museum's Youtube channel. In it, the provost of the still active Austrian monastery Reichersberg, Markus Stefan Grasl, explains the way of thinking and working of this community of men who live according to the rules of the church father Augustine. And these are less strict than the Regula Bendicti. They demand abstinence, but not asceticism. In Klosterneuburg at the gates of Vienna, butlers are said to have looked after the canons until a hundred years ago. And as early as the twelfth century, the Beuerberg lords tried to buy vineyards in South Tyrol by all means - in vain. To this day, the common meal plays an important role; the monastery kitchen, which maintains the monastery garden as a kitchen garden,has proven itself to be a wonderful worldly echo of this tradition.