Kostel Božího těla: A Roman Catholic Pilgrimage Church in Czechia
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Czechia
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Habsburg, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page13 sections
History
Kostel Božího těla, known in English as the Church of Corpus Christi, is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage church in Czechia between Bludov and Hrabenov on the western slopes of Háj, also called Senová. Corpus Christi is the Catholic feast celebrating the Eucharist, understood as the sacramental presence of Christ’s body and blood. The church belongs to the Bludov parish, the Olomouc Diocese, and the Moravian ecclesiastical province. It developed from a medieval church possibly dating to the fourteenth century and became a pilgrimage site with a history reaching back to the sixteenth century.
Medieval origins and early pilgrimages
A pilgrimage church at the site is mentioned in documents from 1553 and 1567 issued by Bedřich of Žerotín, who then owned the Bludov estate. Pilgrimages are recorded from 1583. These references place the site within an established religious tradition before the later Baroque rebuilding.
The foundation of the church is also associated with stories of a consecrated host and miraculous bees. In one tradition, a peasant woman took a host from a church in Šumperk, intending to mix it with cattle feed to increase milk production. After she lost it at the site, wild bees supposedly enclosed it in a wax form resembling a monstrance, a vessel used to display the consecrated host. Another story concerns Kuneš, a widowed cottager who robbed an injured landowner from Hrabenov and left him in a snowdrift. After confession in Šumperk, Kuneš allegedly concealed a host in a prayer book and later lost it at the same place, where bees again formed a wax monstrance around it. Harsher versions say that both offenders were stung to death. These are foundation traditions rather than established historical events.
War, rebuilding, and the hermitage
Local tradition holds that Swedish forces destroyed the church during the Thirty Years’ War, the seventeenth-century conflict that brought warfare and political upheaval across much of Central Europe. The building was later restored under the Lichtenstein-Castelcorn family during the last third of that century. A chapel was built at the pilgrimage site toward the end of the seventeenth century and was subsequently rebuilt in Baroque form, with 1724 given as the completion date.
Hermits associated with the Third Order of Saint Francis settled beside the church at the end of the seventeenth century. This Franciscan-associated order allowed lay people and other members to follow Franciscan spiritual practices without joining the first-order friar community. The hermitage stood beside the church’s north wall, toward Hrabenov. The community remained there until 1782, when Emperor Joseph II abolished the institution of hermits as part of his late-eighteenth-century religious reforms.
Suppression and nineteenth-century revival
The church itself was suppressed in 1784, and its interior furnishings were sold to surrounding villages. Demolition threatened the building until a local resident bought it at auction with money collected from other villagers. This communal effort preserved the church and allowed the pilgrimage tradition to continue.
With the support of Count František Josef of Žerotín, a member of the Moravian Žerotín noble family, secular and ecclesiastical authorities later permitted the restoration of the pilgrimage site. A partly collapsed vault was repaired in 1835, and a sacristy with an upper residential room was added. The church was consecrated again in 1837.
The pilgrimage tradition acquired a further connection with Saint Rosalia after a cholera epidemic in Bludov in 1855 killed about 180 people. The inhabitants vowed to hold a major pilgrimage on the feast day of the saint when the epidemic ended. The disease ceased on 4 September, Saint Rosalia’s feast day. Because she was invoked as a protector against plague, pilgrimages connected with Saint Rosalia and Corpus Christi have continued at the site.
Care and restoration
From 1901 to 1949, the Saint Rosalia Association cared for the church, including its cleanliness and decoration. A chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes was built beside a spring in 1905 by a Bludov physician in memory of his daughter. Extensive repairs to the church followed in 1990 to 1992.
The organ mechanism, dating from 1893, has been gradually restored since 2001 by the Dlabal-Mettler organ workshop. The present Association for the Church of Corpus Christi was founded in May 2018 and works with the Bludov parish to care for and promote the church and its pilgrimage grounds.
Remains
The pilgrimage site lies in woodland and includes the church, the Chapel of Our Lady of Lourdes, a calvary, Ston’s Cross, and the Stations of the Cross. A calvary is a devotional arrangement commemorating Christ’s Passion, while the Stations of the Cross are a sequence of stops representing episodes from that Passion. Together, these features form the surviving physical setting of the pilgrimage grounds.
Church and interior
Structure and vaulting
The church is a masonry building with a longitudinal plan and a single nave. Its rectangular nave leads to a stepped, articulated presbytery, the area containing the main altar and reserved for the clergy. The presbytery ends in a segmented termination, and its smooth facades have windows topped by semicircular arches. In the form completed in 1724, the building had seven windows, three entrances, and a small Baroque tower.
Inside, the presbytery has a cross vault ending in a three-sided lunette, a curved area formed within or beneath a vault. The nave begins with a short section of barrel vaulting and continues through two bays of shallow Prussian vaulting, a compartmented brick vault supported by structural ribs or wall pillars. The pillars are capped by a cornice, and a music gallery occupies the western end of the nave.
Altars and organ
The historic interior included a main altar dedicated to the manifestation of Corpus Christi, two side altars, a small altar with a statue of the Infant Jesus, and three portable altars. Stations of the Cross hung on the walls, and seven confessionals formed part of the furnishings. Above the main altar is probably a Baroque painting of the adoration of the Eucharist.
Two matching altars in early nineteenth-century Baroque forms stand in the nave. One carries an 1832 painting of Saint Dominic by Josef Rotter. The other has a painting of Saint John of Nepomuk by an unknown artist from approximately the same period. The organ mechanism dates from 1893 and remains the subject of gradual restoration begun in 2001.
Pilgrimage grounds
Chapel of Our Lady of Lourdes
The Chapel of Our Lady of Lourdes stands above the spring beside the church and was built in 1905. It contains two water tanks. The upper tank served for refreshment, while barefoot pilgrims used the lower tank to wash their feet. Both tanks were restored in 2025.
Wayside monuments
A nearby wayside shrine dated 1683 consists of a stone Tuscan column supporting a prism-shaped chapel. The chapel has shallow recessed panels and a wrought-iron cross at the top. Ston’s Cross is a small stone monument dated 1843, decorated with reliefs of Saint Joseph and Saint Roch.
Stations of the Cross
The Stations of the Cross are formed by stone chapels with niches arranged in a circle around a central chapel. The stations formerly contained pictures painted on tin and later on another type of support. Their circular arrangement and associated chapels remain part of the physical organization of the woodland pilgrimage site.
