Einsiedeln Abbey

Einsiedeln Abbey, in the canton of Schwyz, Switzerland, is a Benedictine territorial abbey founded in 934 by Eberhard, formerly provost of Strasbourg. Its Chapel of Grace houses the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, which draws around 800,000 pilgrims and tourists each year, part of a pilgrimage tradition tracing back to the abbey's founding and, in its own account, a consecration performed by Christ himself in 948 rather than any Marian apparition. Rebuilt in its present Baroque form, the abbey is one of Switzerland's most significant baroque monastic complexes and today supports a community of roughly forty monks whose abbot sits on the Swiss Bishops' Conference. Alongside its religious life the abbey runs a secondary school of about four hundred students, a winery, a sawmill, and a restaurant, maintains a library of roughly 230,000 printed books and over 1,200 manuscripts, and forms a double monastery with the nearby Fahr Convent, a Benedictine women's community under the abbot's authority.