History of English Churches in Switzerland – Wengen
History of St Bernard’s, Wengen
Most of the churches in these pages were built for Victorian summer visitors, and most of them are now closed, sold or in other hands. Wengen is the exception that proves what the others lacked. Its church went up in 1927 — two generations after the others — because Wengen had something the summer resorts did not: a winter season, invented by the British, that filled the village when the Alps were supposed to be empty. St Bernard’s is still an Anglican church today.
Byron, and the view from the Wengernalp
Schniewind begins where the English interest begins. Ever since Lord Byron was inspired in 1816 to write the dramatic poem Manfred while on a visit to the Wengernalp, the Wengen region has been famous everywhere, and countless English-speaking tourists have come to enjoy the Jungfrau panorama as seen from there. Wengen remains one of the principal attractions for travellers to the Bernese Oberland.
Wengen was placed on the list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1880, and Wengernalp in 1884. For the next thirty-five years that meant what it meant everywhere else in the Alps: the society, as it records itself, “held church services in hotels”.
The ski clubs
What changed was the winter. The Intercontinental Church Society — the CCCS’s successor, which owns the church — puts the reason for building plainly: as visitor numbers increased “following the opening of the Ski, Curling and Downhill Only clubs”, it decided to build a permanent church. Those were British clubs, of the same movement that produced the Kandahar Ski Club founded by Sir Arnold Lunn up the valley at Mürren in 1924. Where the nineteenth-century chaplaincies followed the climbers, Wengen’s church followed the skiers.
ICS acquired land from Herr Ulrich Fuchs-Lauener in 1915 — in the middle of a war, twelve years before it built anything.
A timber church, paid for by subscription
The first design was too grand. ICS’s own account is careful about the attribution and worth quoting as it stands: “We think that the architect who designed the Park Hotel also drew up plans for the church in 1923 (these can still be seen in the Park Hotel). However his design was considered too costly, so the present timber-framed building was constructed, funded by donations.”
So Wengen has a wooden church, put up cheaply by subscription, in a village of grand hotels. It was built in 1927 and dedicated on 15 January 1928 by the Bishop of Fulham — an office that turns up repeatedly in these accounts, the Vevey chaplaincy’s history recording a Bishop of Fulham visiting Château-d’Œx in the same year. Some 200 people heard him preach on Genesis 28:17 — “This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” — which is a text about a man spending an unexpected night in the open and finding it holy ground, and therefore about as well chosen for a mountain village as a text can be.
The church is dedicated to St Bernard, whom ICS describes as “an 11th century saint, famous originally for his hospitality and desire that many may know and understand the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross”. The passes on the Swiss–Italian border carry his name. For a church built to receive strangers, hospitality is the right dedication. It seats over 120 people.
Neighbours
In the early 1950s the Swiss Protestant congregation helped update the building — and, ICS notes in passing, “also used St Bernard’s whilst their new church was being constructed”. It is a small detail with a long echo: across these pages the traffic usually runs the other way, with English congregations borrowing Swiss churches for decades before they could build. At Wengen, for a while, the Swiss borrowed the English one.
The church underwent major repair and refurbishment again between 2002 and 2006.
Writing in 1992, Schniewind recorded Wengen as a summer and winter chaplaincy of the Intercontinental Church Society, with services at St Bernard’s English Church. It continues as an ICS chaplaincy today, served through the winter season by short-term chaplains who come out, unpaid, for a fortnight at a time.
This account rests on Schniewind (1992) and on the Intercontinental Church Society’s own history of the building. For present-day services, see St Bernard’s Wengen.
Date of first Chaplaincy: 1880 (Wengen) and 1884 (Wengernalp), on the Colonial and Continental Church Society list; services held in hotels until 1927
Church dates: Land acquired from Ulrich Fuchs-Lauener 1915; rejected design 1923; built 1927; dedicated 15 January 1928 by the Bishop of Fulham; refurbished 2002–2006
Patron: St Bernard
Hotel: Services were held in the hotels before 1927; the Park Hotel’s architect is thought to have drawn the unbuilt 1923 design
Current Status: In use as St Bernard’s English Church, an Anglican chaplaincy of the Intercontinental Church Society
Sources
“A Brief History of St Bernard’s English Church, Wengen”, Intercontinental Church Society
Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (p. 92)