Pilgrimage Church of the Sorrowful Mother of God - Bödingen
Absolutely a detour - worth a visit !!
Legend
Around 1350, the simple worker Christian von Lauthausen had the Vespers image of the "Mater Dolorosa" carved in a workshop in Cologne after an apparition of the Virgin Mary and initially placed it in a wayside shrine next to his hermitage in the forest near Altenbödingen. Because of the many pilgrims, he wanted to build a chapel for this Pietà there, but this was not possible because the walls kept collapsing overnight. Then he again had a luminous apparition of the Mother of God, who commanded him to load his mule and to follow it. The chapel was then built where the mule stopped in the wilderness.
pilgrimage church and monastery
Pastor Meisenbach then began building a large pilgrimage church in 1397 to accommodate the growing flow of pilgrims to this location. The church was built in honor of the miraculous image of the Mater Dolorosa. In 1408 the Church of the Sorrowful Mother and the Three Kings was consecrated. It is the oldest pilgrimage site of the Sorrowful Mother in Germany. Both builders of the church, Christian von Lauthausen and Peter Meisenbach, died in 1417 on September 17, 1417 and were buried there. After the introduction of the Compassion Festival, the Bödingen monastery of the Augustinian canons was founded in 1424 in order to be able to look after the increased number of pilgrims. In order to be able to better separate the monastic church services from the pilgrimages, the church was expanded in 1439-1500 to include a transept and a choir. The famous monastery reformer Johannes Busch (1399-1480) worked as a deacon in this monastery. It has been a Catholic parish church since the monastery was abolished. It has been a listed building since 1991
Source: Wikipedia