The aim of the study is to create a “documented” literary and theological history of German Catholic hymnography. The paper focuses on the creation of a corpus of liturgical texts in German and describes the first stage of annotation dealing with the metatextual markup of Catholic hymns. The authors dwell in detail on the parameters of the multi-level classification of hymn texts they developed, which allows them to differentiate hymns on different grounds. The parameters include not only characteristics that represent hymns (the period and the source of their origin, rubrics, musical accompaniment), but also ones that are inherent for strophes. Based on the created markup, it is possible to trace general trends in texts divided according to certain meta-features. The developed scheme of annotation is given on the example of the hymnbook Gotteslob (1975). The results present statistics on different parameters used for hymn description.