St. Catherine’s Church

An uninitated observer would be hard pressed to identify St. Catherine’s Church as one of the oldest religious buildings in town. The medieval Gothic core remains, but the 19th century reconstruction significantly changed the face of the church. The patron of the church, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, gave name to the village Kateřinky (Dorf Kathreyn).

It is plausible that there was another sacral building on the site of today’s church, but an archeological survey would have to be conducted to provide a conclusive answer. The first reference to the church, which dates to 1369, describes the installation of an altar panel painting dedicated to St. Catherine in a church of the same name. However, it is possible that the text refers to another church. The first confirmed reference from 1417 suggests that the church had been in operation for some time before the text was written. Architectural survey dates the building to the 1360s or 1370s.

The church originally had one rectangular nave, octagonal presbytery with a sacristy on the north. To this day the perimeter wall and the south entrance except the west part of the nave have been preserved. The presbytery, which is separated from the nave with a broken triumphal arch, has an original elegant cross ribbed vault with sedile – places for important worshippers.

Until the beginning of the 19th century the church kept its original medieval appearance, as is evident from the first reconstruction report after a fire in 1764. The changes included a new flat wooden ceiling and a wooden turret. From an account from the turn of the 17th century we know that the catchment area of the church together with its cemetery were villages surrounding Opava – today’s Kateřinky, Malé Hoštice, and Kylešovice. The cemetery was in use until 1869 when a new cemetery opened by a nearby Chapel of the Holy Cross, the so called Swedish Chapel. The masses in the church, which presumably came under the parish of Virgin Mary’s Church in Opava, were in the mid-17th century held both in Czech and German.

In the course of the 19th and 20th century the church underwent several reconstructions and restorations. The reconstruction of 1806 significantly changed the appearance of the church. The west wall was torn down and the church was extended. The nave got a new vault and organ loft, and the facade got a prismatic turret with an onion-shaped dome, lantern, and hip knob. Today the church is newly cast, it has buttresses on the sides, and the front is segmented by pillars and adorned with a principal moulding.

There are 14 panel paintings depicting the stations of the cross painted by Jan Lukáš Kracker in 1761. The cycle is presumed to have been painted for St. Barbara’s Church in Ostrožná Street in Opava and it was moved to Kateřinky after the church had closed down in 1796. Incidentally, it was the same year when Countess Maria Anna Renard, a daughter of Freiherr Sobek of Kornice, died. Her stela is in the outer wall of the presbytery. The heavily damaged sandstone tombsotne features a relief of two coats of arms – her husband’s and Maria Anna’s, which has a crown of a count and a cross on top and is carried by two lions. Next to this tombstone there is another one, a little more recent and more damaged tomb of Vincenc Matyáš Rudzinský, the owner of a farmstead in Kateřinky. There is a sculpture of St. Florian in the church gadern. The patron of firefighters was moved there in 1923 from the crossroads of Ratibořská and Černá Street. The sculpture, an important Baroque relic, was made in 1721 by an unkown author, and it depicts the saint as a Roman soldier with a lance as he is pouring water from a bucket.