CHURCH OF ST. CHARLES BORROMEO

The church is an integral part of the adjacent Hospital of the Merciful Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo. The spiritual administration is provided by the Premonstratensian Order of Strahov.

Pod Petřínem, Vlašská 36, Praha 1

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THE MOTHER CHURCH OF THE SISTERS OF ST. CHARLES BORROMEO

The heart of our activity as Sisters of St. Charles is the Lord God with the church as the centre of our gatherings, prayer and praise. It is here in this church where we pronounce and renew our vows. Everyday celebration of the Mass liturgy strengthens our own offering thus setting the tone for life in community and in service for others. Something very specific to our church is its proximity to the hospital making it not an enclosed world unto itself but, thank God, an open welcoming space.

The church and its religious services as well as bed to bed patient visitation of the entire Hospital complex of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles located on the Petřín hillside is under the watchful pastoral care of the Norbertine White Canons of the neighbouring Strahov Abbey. The church of St. Charles Borromeo, our patron saint, indeed, proclaims a vision of simplicity and clarity. One’s gaze is at once directed to the crucifix dominating the sanctuary and the victorious Lamb on the tabernacle. Both depictions of the One Jesus Christ whose passion and death with love and the   reward of life in his resurrection, are always present in our daily lives.

SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SISTERS OF ST. CHARLES

In 1652 shortly after the Thirty Years War there arose in the city of Nancy, Lorraine, a group of pious widows and young women under the patronage of ‘Handmaids of the Holy Family.’ At the very beginning of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Charles, two persevering French women, Anna Royer and Barbe Godefrey together with a pious lawyer, Emmanuel Chauvenel, deserve particular attention. It was he who on June 18th 1652 by deeding his house to the Sisters as ‘a House of Mercy’ inaugurated the Congregation’s mission. Local townsfolk affectionately named them ‘the Sisters of St. Charles’ because they noticed a statue of St. Charles Borromeo near the entrance to the house above the domestic well. In 1837 responding to an earlier invitation of Professor Alois Klar (+1833), a multinational group of six Czech, French and German Sisters from Nancy, Lorraine, arrived in Prague. Six years later the sisters made a courageous decision to give notice to the Klar Institute for Blind Adults and with the financial help of the Lobkowicz family they were to purchase a track of land comprising of the former vineyard of the Strahov Abbey and the onetime residence of Baron Josef Bretfeld at the base of the Petřín Hill. During the years 1851 through 1854 the Sisters of St. Charles constructed a new hospital there as well as an adjoining spiritual, administrative and educational centre for the Congregation. There, for anyone experiencing a sleepless night, a crisis of uncertainty, alarm and fear, the Sisters wanted to provide a fitting place, a source of hope where one could meet his Creator. On November 4th 1855, the newly completed Church of St. Charles Borromeo was consecrated in memory of that Italian Saint invoked as an intercessor during plagues and epidemics and who never was indifferent to human suffering and need.

SAINT CHARLES BORROMEO (1538 – 1584) THE PATRON OF THE CHURCH AND THE CONGREGATION

St. Charles was born into the comital Borromeo family October 2nd 1538 on the shore of Lago Maggiore, Italy. After receiving his doctorate in both Church and Civil Law in Pavia, his maternal uncle, Giovanni Angelo Medici, elected Pope as Pius IV (1559 – 1565), called his youthful nephew into Vatican service.  First, created Cardinal and Secretary of State at the age of 24, he received both priestly and  episcopal consecration the following year aged 25. The Pope then delegated him to the Council of Trent which he finally brought to a successful conclusion on December 4th 1563 implementing its decrees with legislative norms.

  Soon after he assumed personal responsibility of his vast archdiocese of Milan he zealously visited      the most remote parishes and established various educational institutions both for the clergy and laity. In 1569 he survived an assassination attack and during the plague which struck Milan in 1576 he, against the strong urging of the Spanish governing administrators, remained in his city giving   wholehearted assistance to the afflicted. So totally exhausted he died at the age of 46 on November 3rd 1584 and was canonized in 1610.                    

The church, completed in 1855 according to the plan of the architect Adalbert Gudera, is a single-nave building in the late classicist style. It is directly accessible form both Vlašská street and form the two floors of the hospital building. At the façade of the Church the statues of the Congregation’s patron saints are placed: St. Joseph and those patrons against plague, St. Sebastian and St. Roch.                   

THE CHURCH IN THE 20TH CENTURY

The ministry of the Sisters of St. Charles in the hospital wards and in the operating rooms was forcibly forbidden by the Communist regime in August 1952. Sisters younger than 30 years were conscripted for work in textile factories in northern Bohemia; some 22 sisters were imprisoned while the remaining sisters were allocated to work in demeaning circumstances in the border regions. The hospital was nationalized and in 1962 the church of St. Charles once secularized became for many years a medical book depository and its mobile furnishings and precious artifacts were handed over to the State Religious Foundation.

Then in 1990 the Sisters of St. Charles returned to their hospital after 38 years and once again served at the bedsides of the sick. Upon an extensive reconstruction the church of St. Charles was reconsecrated by Cardinal Miroslav Vlk, the Archbishop of Prague, on August 22nd 1993. The church has been likened to a well where water is drawn, one drinks and draws for others. Those thirsty ones are both the sisters and other hospital staff on one hand and the patients on the other. Everyone who lives knows the thirst of body and soul; the thirst for acceptance, human contact, understanding, sympathy; the thirst for truth and love; the thirst for the water of life. An access to this well is enabled also by the two oratories directly conjoint with the hospital in its very architecture.

The artistic executing and designing the stone altar, the lecturn, the tabernacle and presiding chair was the work of the renowned sculptor, Petr Váňa. He used a fine marble, a precious white Italian botticino marble combined with purple and dark crimson marble of Slivenec.

The Cross on the front wall of the presbytery is a donation made by architect Karel Filsak.

THE FRESCO OF OUR LADY, QUEEN OF THE ANGELS    

The fresco of Our Lady, Queen of Angels is the only witness to all that has happened in the church. Thanks to its near inaccessible height it survived the secularization of the church. Painted by the artist Vilém Kandler in 1854 and 1855, it depicts the scene of the enthroned Queen of heaven with the Infant Jesus standing on her lap. Mary is portrayed with all her due queenly attributes: a piously draped red dress under a common blue cape, wearing a crown and holding a golden sceptre.

Certain person once asked a pious man who often prayed: what do you gain by praying to God?

I do not know exactly what I gain rather I can tell what I lose when I pray:

I lost my pride.

I lost my arrogance.

I lost my greed.

I lost my laziness.

I lost my anger.

I lost my taste for white lies.

I lost my impatience, desperation and sadness.

THE PICTURE OF ST. CHARLES BORROMEO                   

This picture of St. Charles was painted for the new church by Vilem Kandler in the years 1853 and 1854. Conceived in the classic style of its setting, the picture was placed on the high altar. After the church was suppressed in 1962, it was taken to Košice, Slovakia, where it remained for many years. In 2021 it was thankfully returned and warmly greeted. St. Charles being the primary patron of the Sisters of Mercy, is forever bound with the sick. From the picture we take the message of his life: his inner being anchored in Christ, a reform which always begins within oneself, a caring heart which is always ready to help people. This painting tells us about the only human community that we share in our humanity – whether poor or wealthy, healthy or sick, young or old, cloistered or living in a family.

THE PIETA

The depiction of the Blessed Mother holding the body of Christ taken down from the Cross is that of one lamenting the deceased which in western Christian tradition has motivated personal piety. This polychromed gothic Madonna dating from the 14th century, posited in a niche at the right wall of the church, came from the ancient abbey of St. George at the Prague Castle. At the time, after the death of the last Benedictine nun belonging to that community which had been suppressed by Emperor Joseph II. in 1782, Archbishop Ondřej Skarbek Ankwicz of Prague confided the image to the Sisters of St. Charles upon their arrival in Prague. It became an illustrious gift and an offering of living grace. In 1952 after the Sisters of St. Charles were expelled from the hospital the Pieta was secretly handed over to private care from which in 1963 it was returned to the care of the nuns in Hradiště, Znojmo, the motherhouse of the Congregation at that time.

THE PIPE ORGAN

The original organ posited in the first choir loft of the Church was installed by Josef Gartner in 1855. In 1903 Jindrich Schiffner installed a pneumatic system which was dismantled when the church was secularized in 1962 and it disappeared without a trace. The church is now equipped with the provisional organ, built by Karl Schiffner in 1884, originally for the church of St. Roch in Strahov. In 1968 this organ was moved to the Marian shrine of Svatá Hora. With the renewal of our church, after many changes and much alteration, it was moved to its present location in the church of St. Charles in 1994. Speaking of this mechanized instrument we have to mention its defects in sound, tone and overall performance. Over the past years we have been speaking about a new organ suitable for the size and the acoustics of the church. And, so we earnestly desire that the sound of a new “royal instrument”, as organ is called, be a fitting accompaniment for singing and music in our church and that our guests be lifted to a higher spiritual sphere and perceptible beauty.

Take the note and contribute for a new organ. Thus every played piece and sung prayer can carry a bit of yourself.

Support the spiritual care of the patients in the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo in liturgy, culture, attendance at concerts and education.

BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER: 1028743011/0100

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