Pfarrkirche Maria Laah

The Pfarrkirche Maria Laah stands in the village of Maria Laah within the market town of Wolfern in Upper Austria. This Roman Catholic parish church of Our Lady’s Name belongs to the Steyr deanery in the Diocese of Linz. It is protected as a listed monument.

The church began as a chapel beside a holy spring first recorded in 1212. Pilgrims came to the spring, which rises directly beneath the altar and is channelled into a small chapel a few steps east of the church. The name Maria Laah comes from the Old German word for leafy wood rather than the earlier idea of a pool. In 1627 Achaz von Losensteinleiten placed the church in the care of Dominicans from Steyr. In 1690 Franz Anton von Losenstein, a cathedral provost in Passau, enlarged the building and rededicated it to the Holy Trinity, Our Lady and the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

The church has a late-15th-century Gothic choir with net-ribbed vaulting and a three-eighths apse. The single nave with barrel vaults was rebuilt in 1690. A west tower shaped like a roof lantern tops the nave. Inside, the furnishings are neo-Gothic, including a high altar with a baroque copy of a medieval Madonna and Child. On the church’s west side the Auersperg family vault holds the remains of several princes and countesses, marked by three memorial tablets.