Spitalkirche St. Johannes der Täufer

Spitalkirche St. Johannes der Täufer stands in Passau, Germany, where three rivers meet. A tour of the city begins at this church. The church belongs to the St. Johannis hospital foundation, which the Passau cathedral chapter founded in 1198. From the start the hospital has cared for the sick and the elderly. The city took it over in 1278, and it still lives on as a senior citizens' home.

A deed of donation from Duke Leopold VI of Austria, dated 29 March 1200, records the dedication to John the Baptist. Raised by the later bishop Ulrich II, he became the first princely patron of a hospital modelled on the Knights Hospitaller. The building itself rose between 1206 and 1215 under Bishop Manegold in the early Gothic style. After a great city fire in 1662, a Baroque remodelling reshaped it over several decades. Donations from the faithful enriched the interior, which at one point held eleven altars, each in a different style. In 1839 the cathedral chapter ordered the removal of most Baroque furnishings, except five large altars. Between 1860 and 1864 Bishop Heinrich von Hofstätter remade the interior in a style few other churches preserve: Bishop Heinrich Gothic. He chose the artworks himself, mixing late Gothic Franconian sculptures with nineteenth-century works by Munich sculptors. Plaster casts of works by Riemenschneider, Veit Stoss and Adam Kraft joined them, and red marble gravestones arrived from other Passau churches.

Above the hospital courtyard door, an original stone relief from about 1400 shows the Man of Sorrows between Mary and John. Six reliefs retell the life of John the Baptist, the church's patron saint. Nearly a hundred epitaphs from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries line the walls. The church opens mainly for events rather than for daily visits. Two doors give the facade its symmetry, but only the western one works: the eastern one leads nowhere.