St. Katharina

St. Katharina is a Roman Catholic parish church in Langenzersdorf, a village in Lower Austria. It began as a simple early-Gothic building in the early fourteenth century and was later enlarged and reshaped in the Baroque style. The church stands at the centre of the village, surrounded by houses and gardens.

The church is worth visiting for its layered history and fine furnishings. The high altar, designed by Matthias Steinl around 1710, shows a copy of the 1749 destroyed painting of Saint Catherine’s martyrdom. A fourteenth-century Gothic window survives in the south aisle, while the Baroque vaults and altars date from the early eighteenth century. The tower, rebuilt after a fire in 1817, reaches almost forty metres and carries a late-Baroque copper dome added in 1902.

Inside, the four-bay nave has cross-rib vaults in the west and flat Baroque vaults elsewhere. The north aisle altar displays the martyrdom of Saint Barbara, flanked by statues of Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch. The south aisle altar holds a late-seventeenth-century figure of the Virgin and Child, with statues of Saints Joachim and Anna. A 1600s oil painting of Saint Catherine before the Madonna was once in the Liechtenstein collection. The church’s oldest bell, cast in 1721, still rings as the death knell.