Einsiedeln Abbey

Einsiedeln Abbey is a Benedictine monastery within the village of Einsiedeln inside the canton of Schwyz, Switzerland. The abbey is devoted to Our Lady of the Hermits, the name being derived from the occasions of its foundation, for the first inhabitant of the place turned into Saint Meinrad, a hermit. It is a territorial abbey and, consequently, now not part of a diocese, problem to a bishop.

It has been a main resting point on the Way of St. James for hundreds of years. Meinrad become educated on the abbey school on Reichenau Island, in Lake Constance, underneath his kinsmen, Abbots Hatto and Erlebald, where he became a monk and become ordained a clergyman. After a few years at Reichenau, and at a structured priory on Lake Zurich, he embraced an eremitical existence and set up his hermitage at the slopes of the mountain of Etzel.

He died on January 21, 861, on the hands of two robbers who notion that the hermit had a few treasured treasures, but at some stage in the following 80 years the area become never without one or greater hermits emulating Meinrad's example. One of them, named Eberhard, formerly Provost of Strassburg, erected in 934 a monastery and church there, of which he became first abbot.