Kostel svatého Františka Xaverského Church

The Church of Saint Francis Xavier in Bělá u Děčína is a late Baroque building and the parish church of the Roman Catholic parish of Bělá u Děčína. It stands on the site of an original chapel. It was built in the years seventeen eighty-seven and seventeen eighty-eight by the North Bohemian builder Jan Václav Kosch and the money for the construction was provided by a religious fund.

After nineteen forty-six, when the last German priest Ernst John was expelled, the spiritual administration was taken over by the parish of Děčín-Pomokly. In the years nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty-one, the church received a new roof and the tower was repaired. The state paid the costs of one hundred thousand Czechoslovak crowns. The nave then served as a storage facility for equipment from other churches, for example from the Church of Saint Václav in Rozbělesích. Then came a period of decline. The roof began to leak, the vault of the nave was damaged and the coloured windows were broken. Significant renovation came only after the year two thousand. The church is protected as a cultural monument.

The building is single-nave and rectangular, with a narrower, tri-apsed closed presbytery and a low sacristy on the south side. Above the western façade rises a prismatic tower. In the superstructure of the rectangular portal is a Latin inscription with a chronogram, which conceals the date seventeen eighty-seven. Higher up is an oval window and on the gable stand statues of the Virgin Mary, Saint Florian and Saint Václav. The nave with rounded corners is covered by a flat reed vault with lunettes. The walls are articulated by pairs of pilasters and a surrounding cornice. The gallery rests on two pillars.

The furnishings are mostly Baroque, mainly from the eighteenth century. On the pseudo-Baroque main altar there was once a painting of Christ calming the storm on the lake by the painter Brendel from nineteen thirty. Today there hangs a painting of Saint Francis Xavier at baptism from two thousand and six. The pulpit is early Baroque.

Interesting are the fates of the organs here. The first small instrument from Litoměřice was sold to Saxony. In seventeen ninety-two, Antonín Rutsch brought a positive organ from Kostomlaty pod Milešovkou here. Originally it was part of an organ which the organ builder Standfuss built there in seventeen thirty-five, and a year later the Děčín carpenter Cajetan Windrich decorated and marbled it. In eighteen sixty-four the instrument was rebuilt by organ builder Müller. In December nineteen hundred and four the old organ was replaced by a new seven-stop instrument from the Prague workshop of Schiffner. Its façade pipes were confiscated in nineteen eighteen. During the communist totalitarianism, the organ was taken to Slovakia. From the old instrument only the Baroque case of the Standfuss positive organ remained in the gallery railing. In nineteen ninety-three, disassembled and already damaged organs from the Church of Saint Prokop in Javorech were brought here and stored, where there was a threat of the roof collapsing.