Ferdinand Schulte Berge

Around 1950 to 1955, a phase of building new churches began in nearly all of Germany’s Catholic dioceses. The big parishes were to be broken up. I’m thinking for example of my home town of Gladbeck: the St. Lamberti parish encompassed nearly 20,000 Catholics, and so they founded new parishes so that the parishes weren’t so large anymore. In the 1960s and 70s, almost a hundred new churches were built in the diocese of Essen; small parishes. Now, the small parishes are being dissolved and larger ones formed again. Well, that was the great thing about Hengsbach. Within the Essen diocese, over the course of 100 years of mining, there had always been tensions between the workers and management. And the unions played a big role in that. And Hengsbach strove quite successfully to strike a balance between workers and management.