Parish Church of the Heart of Mary

The Parish Church of the Heart of Mary is a Roman Catholic church located at Pottendorfer Straße 117 in Wiener Neustadt’s Josefstadt area.

The church’s origins can be traced back to a church barracks in a military hospital during World War I.This was utilized as a clubhouse and theater in the republic after the war.With the foundation of the Austro-fascist system in 1934, it was repurposed as a so-called emergency church for the employees’ living section of the war hospital.Cardinal Theodor Innitzer dedicated the Barackenkirche to Mary’s Immaculate Conception in 1934.Following Austria’s annexation in 1939, the barracks church was dismantled, and the faithful in the war hospital district were sent to the suburban church.Following the Second World WarIn 1945, it was feasible to obtain another and the last surviving barracks from the German Labor Front’s liquidation office and continue pastoral care on-site.

The church was rebuilt between 1957 and 1959 according to the architect Josef Patzelt’s ideas as a rectangular concrete structure with a flat hipped roof, a side bell tower, and an associated two-story vicarage.The young architect had already won architectural competitions when cathedral provost Prelate Leopold Uhl requested him to create a design.During the Second World War, Patzelt had purchased the book New Church Art in the Spirit of the Liturgy by Pius Parsch and Robert Kramreiter, which had a major influence on him, and the original draft envisaged a central building that would gather the faithful around the altar.Msgr. Alois Penall of Lanzenkirchen in the Archdiocese of Vienna, ten years before Vatican II, according to Patzelt, “brought me down, and it became a tame church building.”A remnant of concentration was retained by an open connecting side chapel from which the ceremony at the main altar can still be experienced.Kramreiter’s design work began with his visit to the Hohe Wand chapel.The vicarage also needed to find room on the site, which was developed, with the church dominating the vicarage’s ridge with a full-circumferential cornice.Patzelt dared to have triple windows, as a reference to the triune God, above the main entrance and at the tower, which break through the surrounding cornice towards the sky, in contravention of the conventional design constraints.Patzelt developed a ceiling band that leads the faithful to the altar in the nave’s interior.Florian Jakowitsch of Wiener Neustadt created the design.

The church was consecrated by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer in 1959, and was upgraded to the status of a parish church after a vow by Prelate Uhl in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

In 1959, a bell by Heinrich Reinhard from 1617 with a relief image of a crucifixion group with the loving donor Archduke Maximilian III. was transferred from the former imperial castle’s St. George’s Church to the ringing of the parish church of the Heart of Mary.