St. Catherine's Church, Gothic church in Lübeck's Old City, Germany.
St. Catherine's Church is a brick Gothic church in Lübeck's Old City, part of a former Franciscan monastery complex. It now serves as a museum and is one of the few monastery complexes of its kind to survive largely intact in northern Germany.
The Franciscans received the site at the corner of Königstraße and Glockengießerstraße in 1225, while Francis of Assisi was still alive. Around 1303 the east end with choir and transept was rebuilt in Brick Gothic; a dispute with Bishop Burkhard von Serkem halted work around 1310, and building resumed in 1319 with funding from mayor Segebodo Crispin. The nave was finished by 1356, when the Saxon Franciscan province held its chapter here. In 1531 Johannes Bugenhagen's church ordinance turned the monastery into the Katharineum Latin school.
The church is named after Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Since 1980 it has served as a museum church, showing a copy of Bernt Notke's Saint George group made for Stockholm's Storkyrkan, an epitaph by Godfrey Kneller for his father, and Tintoretto's Resurrection of Lazarus. The medieval altars, such as Hermen Rode's St. Luke altar, are kept in the St. Annen Museum.
The church sits in Lübeck's Old City, which is easy to explore on foot from the main train station. It is worth checking opening times in advance, as the museum is open seasonally.
Set into the outer facade are sculptures by Ernst Barlach and Gerhard Marcks, two of the most recognized German sculptors of the 20th century. These works were made from modern clinker brick and are embedded directly into the medieval brick walls.
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