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Boneffe Abbey was a Cistercian monastery on the banks of the Mehaigne in what is now the municipality of Éghezée. The abbot's residence, first built in the early 16th century and repaired in the 17th and 18th centuries, is now a listed building that is currently in use as a farmhouse.
The earliest attestation to the monastery's existence is a papal bull of 1222. The abbey church was consecrated in 1267. At this period it was a monastery for Cistercian nuns.
In 1413 the community of nuns was disbanded, and by 1461 the Cistercian Order had redesignated the property as a monastery for monks. The house was briefly evacuated in 1480-1483 due to an outbreak of plague. In November 1568, early in the Dutch Revolt, the abbey and its church were set on fire by rebel forces. The community fled and the abbot, Cornelis Lievens, died in Leuven in 1569. Rebuilding began in 1589, and the church was reconsecrated in 1617 by Jean Dauvin, bishop of Namur.
The monastery was on the front lines of the War of the Spanish Succession, just a few miles from Ramillies, and suffered depredations and damage accordingly. Fresh rebuilding work was completed in 1711.
After the French invasion of the Southern Netherlands, the revolutionaries suppressed Boneffe Abbey along with all other religious houses.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.