History of English Churches in Switzerland – Belalp
History of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Belalp
The chapel on the Belalp stands above the Aletsch glacier with a view that takes in the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, and it was once described as the most photographed church in Switzerland. It was built by a hotel keeper for his English guests, held in his family’s private ownership for a hundred years, and has been a Catholic chapel since the war. Of all the churches in these pages it is the one where the commercial logic of the Alpine chaplaincy is most nakedly visible — and the one with the best view.
The English on the Belalp
There had been a chapel on the Belalp long before the English came: Schniewind records that the first was constructed in 1696. Belalp was placed on the list of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1866, and at the beginning the services were held at the Hotel Klingele.
The English presence there is well attested in the Swiss press of the period, and it had a famous figurehead. In August 1880 L’ami du peuple, listing the distinguished guests in the Valais, noted “le célèbre docteur anglais Tyndal, à Bel-Alp” — the celebrated English doctor Tyndall, at Belalp. Thirteen years later the Courrier de Genève, in a letter from Brig of December 1893, was reporting on the effects at “au châlet de Bel-Alp de M. Tyndall, Anglais, bien connu chez nous, mort” — the Belalp chalet of the late Mr Tyndall, an Englishman well known in the region. The Belalp was, in other words, not merely a hotel with English visitors but a place where a celebrated Englishman kept a house until he died.
The wider pattern shows in the same papers. In September 1885 the Gazette du Valais reported that the mountain stations had been packed — “Eggishorn, Bel-Alp, Zermatt, Zinal, St-Luc, Vissoie, Evolène, Champéry et Morgins” — the same list of villages that, one after another, acquired English chapels.
Klingele’s chapel
In consequence of the increasing number of English visitors, the Klingele family built a new chapel and gave the use of it to the SPG.
World Heritage Experience Switzerland, which interprets the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch World Heritage site in which the Belalp lies, records the building from the Valais side and adds the detail Schniewind lacks — the hotelier’s name and the source of the money: “Die neugotische Kapelle auf Lüsgen wurde in den Jahren 1883/1884 vom Hotelier (Hotel Belalp) Gervas Klingele für die mehrheitlich anglikanischen Gäste des Hotels erbaut, welche die Errichtung auch finanziell unterstützten.” The neo-Gothic chapel on Lüsgen was built in 1883–84 by Gervas Klingele of the Hotel Belalp for the hotel’s mostly Anglican guests — who also supported its construction financially.
So the guests paid for the chapel that made the hotel attractive to guests. It opened in 1884 and was consecrated in 1887 by the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Dr Ellicott, under the name Church of the Good Shepherd.
The same Valais account supplies what the English records do not: what the neighbours made of it. “Jahrzehntelang hielt ein englischer Pastor in der Kapelle, von den Einheimischen auch Tempel genannt, den anglikanischen Gottesdienst ab” — for decades an English pastor held the Anglican service in the chapel, which the locals called the Temple. In a Catholic canton, an Anglican chapel on the alp was not a church. It was the Temple.
Far from the madding crowd
The chapel was closed during the First World War and re-opened in 1920. An SPG report of 1923 gives the flavour of the place better than any description:
Belalp is certainly far from the madding crowd. Seems to have been the rendez-vous of Bishops years ago.
In 1924 it was remarked that “many visitors” came to Belalp. Then the decline set in. By 1932 the number of British visitors had dwindled to the point that the SPG discontinued the summer chaplaincy, before the Second World War.
The Valais account tells the ending differently, attributing it to the war rather than to the economics: “Die Wirren des Zweiten Weltkriegs führten dazu, dass in der neugotischen Kapelle keine anglikanischen Gottesdienste mehr abgehalten wurden” — the turmoil of the Second World War led to no more Anglican services being held in the chapel. The two accounts cannot both be the whole story, and we cannot settle between them; Schniewind is the more precise about the date, the Valais source about the cause.
What both agree on is what happened next. From 1941 the chapel passed into Catholic use — Schniewind dating that use from 13 July 1941, and the Valais account explaining the mechanism: “1941 gestattete der Bischof von Sitten den Gläubigen, die Kapelle für die katholische Messe zu benutzen”, in 1941 the Bishop of Sion permitted the faithful to use the chapel for Catholic Mass.
The last numbers Schniewind gives are bleak and exact. In 1948 the hotel registered twenty English guests; in 1949, five. An SPG report of 1953 closed the file:
Belalp is a wash-out as a centre for British tourists, and therefore the raison d’être for the chaplaincy has disappeared.
The Klingeles let go
In 1982 the chapel was given by the Klingele family to the Roman Catholic Pfarrei Naters — a hundred years, near enough, after they had built it, and having held it privately throughout. That is unusual in this collection: most of these buildings belonged to an English missionary society and were sold by it when the money ran out. Belalp’s chapel was always a Valais family’s property, lent to the English for as long as the English came.
This account rests on sources published up to 1992, together with the World Heritage interpretation of the Aletsch region. It does not describe the chapel’s present-day use, which is Roman Catholic.
Date of first Chaplaincy: 1866 (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel); an earlier chapel on the site dated from 1696
Church dates: Built 1883–84 by Gervas Klingele; opened 1884; consecrated 1887 by the Bishop of Gloucester; Anglican chaplaincy discontinued 1932; Catholic use from 1941
Patron: The Good Shepherd
Hotel: Hotel Belalp (the Hotel Klingele), whose proprietor Gervas Klingele built the chapel and whose family owned it until 1982
Current Status: Roman Catholic, owned by the Pfarrei Naters since 1982
Sources
Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (p. 108)
“Die neugotische Kapelle auf Lüsgen”, World Heritage Experience Switzerland (ourheritage.ch)
L’ami du peuple, 15 August 1880; Gazette du Valais, 23 September 1885; Courrier de Genève, 15 December 1893 — in the Swiss digitised press collection, e-newspaperarchives.ch