Parish Church Maria Queen of Peace

The Catholic parish church Maria, Queen of Peace stands on a small plot in Bürs, a village in the Bludenz district of Vorarlberg. Built between 1968 and 1973 to designs by Walter Moser, it forms a single polygonal complex with a priest’s house and parish centre. The church’s patron is the Virgin Mary, whose feast day is celebrated every 1 January. The building was commissioned after the 1950s population boom left the old church too small for worship and community work. A local landowners’ cooperative donated the land free of charge in 1963, and sculptor Herbert Albrecht created the interior fittings. Bishop Bruno Wechner consecrated the church on 11 November 1973, the feast of St Martin, Bürs’s old patron. Inside, the half-circular plan focuses on a dark-grey marble altar whose tabernacle is shaped like the letter F for Frieden. A 16th-century crucifix hangs above the ambo, while the St Wolfgang chapel contains a late-15th-century altar whose painted wings show saints and a 1580 predella. The organ, installed in 1975 by Gebrüder Mayer, has 1,709 pipes and a mechanical action. Six bronze bells, cast in Innsbruck and Passau, ring above the entrance.