St. Catherine

The Roman Catholic parish church of St. Katharina is a listed church building in Assinghausen, a district of the town of Olsberg in the Hochsauerland district, in North Rhine-Westphalia.
A predecessor church under the patronage of St. Peter has been documented since 1300. In that year, the parish received a letter of indulgence signed by several bishops in Rome. This letter was intended to attract believers and thus bring money into the church coffers. The church was a Romanesque building with a steeple, and it stood in the middle of a cemetery. In a camp book from 1830 the following description can be found: The parish church of Assinghausen lies in the churchyard, completely surrounded by it, massively built, covered with a stone vault and slate, together with a tower, which is still connected, but is quite dilapidated. The church is also much too small for the number of souls of the parish, it is urgently necessary that a new building must be built. No further documents have survived for the church from the centuries after the letter of indulgence. Presumably, these were destroyed in a fire in the church in Brunskappel in 1764. At that time, Assinghausen belonged to Brunskappel. The only surviving record is a copy of a note made by Father Benedict Peters from Bruchhausen and kept in the Münster State Archives. So the church was extensively restored in 1580. The wooden flat roof was demolished and the side walls bricked up. A roof covered with slate was built and a stone vault was installed. This work was almost equivalent to a new church building. The community belonged to Brunskappel from 1600 to 1773, as the majority of the population of Assinghausen was Protestant and it was not worthwhile to maintain its own parish. After that, the parish was again canonically independent. The walls of the old church were divided by nine windows, it was equipped with an altar, a small organ, a sermon chair and a baptismal font. Sixty pews were set up, three bells hung in the tower, which was equipped with a clock, and one in the turret. The sacred objects included a monstrance made of partially gilded silver, a ciborium and two chalices.

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