Schmerzhafte Mutter St. Maria-Kirche

St. Marien Schmerzhafte Mutter stands on a slope above Flensburg’s old town, a red-brick hall church in the 19th-century Gothic Revival style. Designed by Bremen architect Heinrich Flügel, it replaced a small chapel that had become too small for a congregation that had grown to two thousand by 1900. The building began in 1898 under Hamburg master builder E. Breitschneider, but workers first struck the old town moat filled with soft peat and sand. A simple flat roof topped the tower until 1909, when the spire and vaults were finished. The parish survived wars, inflation and ground slips, repairing the apse in 1981 and renewing the roof in 2014. The church belongs to a large parish of about twelve thousand members stretching to Kappeln, with nine thousand living in Flensburg itself. A second Catholic church, St Ansgar, stands in the Mürwik district, while St Anna in Harrislee and the former St Michael in Weiche serve outlying areas. The building sits beside the small Burg Schöneck villa and overlooks the street called Nordergraben along its western side. A three-note bronze bell set hangs in the tower, and a large rose window lights the south wall. Inside, a ribbed vault rises over wooden pews and painted stations of the cross. Wooden statues of saints line the aisles, and a side chapel dedicated to St Joseph can be reached from the courtyard. The present organ, built in 2001 by Michael Becker Orgelbau, has twenty-three stops on two manuals and pedal. The main entrance on the south side leads through a heavy wooden door into a space shaped by brick walls and high windows.