Peter Wolf (ed)
The Shrine – Source of Life
Selected Texts
by Fr Joseph Kentenich
Peter Wolf (ed)
The Shrine
Source of Life
Selected Texts
by Fr Joseph Kentenich
Translation by Mary Cole
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
According to the Law of the Open Door
From One Annunciation Hour to Another
Transforming the Chapel into a Place of Pilgrimage
Convinced of Mary's Educational Work in the Shrine
Nothing Without Us
Three Original Pilgrimage Graces
A Picture of Mary for the Shrine
Attachment to the Shrine – Basis for Schoenstatt's Fruitfulness
In the Shadow of the Shrine
The Shrine – Axis of Schoenstatt's life
Prophetic Assessment of the Shrine after Fifteen Years
Strategic Decisions Resulting from Attachment to the Shrine
Taking Effective Possession of a Place
A Shrine for the Diaspora
Origin of the First Daughter Shrine
Place of Effective Educational Work
Space to Experience Christ in a New Way
Origin of the Home Shrine
Heart Shrine
Cosmos of Shrines
Schoenstatt Shrines throughout the World
Sources
Picture credits
Foreword
It was on 22 August 2010. A crumpled and dusty piece of paper with a message written in large, red letters amazed a whole nation, indeed the whole world, and filled them with joy and celebration. It was photographed by thousands of cameras and hit the headlines throughout the world. The crumpled and dusty, less than elegant piece of paper, on which thirty-three Chilean miners who were buried at a depth of 700 meters told their families and the world, "We are fine in the shelter, all 33 of us."
When we, the Schoenstatt Family, celebrate the centenary of the covenant of love on 18 October 2014, many hope it will capture the attention of the media. "But it's not the number of cameras that are directed on us, which is decisive," wrote Fr Eduardo Auza last year at the opening of the triennium of preparation for 2014, "but that the eyes of the world are directed to what can be read in our hearts and on our lips: We are fine in our shelter, in the shrine, all of us together. That is the strong incentive for the renewal that our Family wants to experience, and give to the Church and world."
That is the strong incentive that leads our worldwide Schoenstatt Family from the Year of the Father Current into the Year of the Shrine Current. It is the year in which we look with our Father, Founder and Prophet at the foundations of our covenant of love as our mission, and try to deepen these foundations. The tiny, unspectacular, perhaps even less than elegant, shrine that was born in Father Kentenich's heart at his consecration as a nine-year-old, and that took shape and form on 18 October 1914, is our "piece of paper" towards which the eyes and cameras of the world must be directed when we celebrate the centenary of the covenant of love – all of us together.
A single shrine that embraces the whole world; a single shrine that heals and sanctifies the world – our globalised, secularised and de-personalised world – because a network of shrines has spread over the whole world; because unseen people on the roadside, in the heart of the city or town, at work, in prisons, hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, churches, war zones, and sunk in utter poverty ... walk up to the open doors of a shrine. It could be built of stone, it could be a wayside shrine, a home shrine, or a heart shrine, yet it is a shrine that is global, connected to a network, without boundaries, and utterly person-oriented.
It is a shrine that in any of its forms is a place where we encounter God, a place of evangelisation. Each shrine, from the Original Shrine to each heart shrine, lives from the contributions of each individual person and the whole Schoenstatt Family. It is a shrine where life becomes the Gospel and the Gospel becomes life. As if this worldwide network were not enough, the Mother Thrice Admirable goes even further, she goes out from the shrine to the people as the Pilgrim Mother of God. This leads us into the missionary current.
"We are united in the shrine where the flames of our hearts beat for our Mother Thrice Admirable who, through us, wants to build your kingdom," prayed Fr Kentenich, not 700 meters below the surface of the earth but in the concentration camp at Dachau. We are fine in the shrine – all of us together: all generations, all nations, all communities, all projects, all the people who live the covenant of love. As a result Schoenstatt began to develop a presence and formative power as a living shrine: right at the beginning, on 18 October, in (every) Dachau and on the way to the jubilee of the covenant of love, our mission. The world, the people who wait for what Fr Kentenich has to give, have to encounter and experience a living shrine in Schoenstatt – in each individual member and in the whole worldwide Schoenstatt Family – and be able to say: We are fine in the shrine – all of us together.
At the end of the Year of the Shrine Current, Schoenstatt, the world, the actual world that each one of us forms and moulds, must have increasingly become a shrine. Fr Kentenich's words to us for the Year of the Shrine Current are designed to motivate us time and again in this year, and to awaken our creative and formative powers.
As the Team 2014 we thank Monsignor Peter Wolf and the Josef Kentenich Institut most sincerely for this valuable contribution to the second year of the triennium of preparation for 2014.
Schoenstatt, 20 July 2011
Fr José María Garcia – Sr. M. Luciane Machens
Introduction
The Schoenstatt Movement is preparing for the centenary of its foundation for which the international planning conference in 2008 in Schoenstatt gave out a strong signal. The Schoenstatt Movement all over the world has decided to follow a three-year pilgrimage of preparation. In the first year, the "Year of the Father Current”, the Family gathered around its Father and Founder. Many countries have allowed themselves to be addressed by the travelling Father Symbol. Texts by the Founder on the importance of the Father have gradually been translated into a number of languages, and been taken up by the worldwide Family. According to the suggestion of the international planning conference, and following the invitation of the General Presidium, the second year of the triennium will centre on our attachment to Schoensatt's shrine.
The Section Mittelrhein of the Josef Kentenich Institut has gladly met the request of the General Presidium and Team 2014, and is placing texts of the Founder at everyone’s disposal. These texts deal with the centrality of the shrine in the life of the Schoenstatt Movement. In this collection of texts we want to show how the Founder’s constant search and interpretation of events resulted in the belief and vision of the importance and mission of the shrine, which has been accepted by the Movement.
When the international Schoenstatt Movement celebrates its centenary on 18 October 2014, it is to be a festival of faith and gratitude. These sentiments are based on the faith and decision of its Founder, Fr Joseph Kentenich, to fundamentally connect and consolidate the start of the Movement with the shrine as a place of grace. Neither the proclamation of a new programme (27 October 1912), nor the decision to found the Marian Sodality (19 April 1914), nor his move into the public domain with the foundation of the Apostolic Federation at Hörde, Germany (20 August 1919), marked for him the start of the new initiative. This is connected with the development of the shrine since 18 October 1914.
In 1912 the young Spiritual Director, Joseph Kentenich was looking for practical ways to form and educate the students at the new Pallottine College in Vallendar Schoenstatt. His first step was to found a Mission Association, and this led to the foundation of a Marian Sodality after the example of the Jesuits. It was then that he came across an article in a newspaper, the “Allgemeine Rundschau”. In its edition of 18 July 1914 Fr Cyprian Fröhlich reported on the social commitment of the Italian lawyer, Bartolo Longo,[1] who had built an orphanage and started a place of pilgrimage in the Valley ofPompeii, not far from Vesuvius.
In the course of July Fr Kentenich asked the Pallottine Provincial, Fr Michael Kolb, to make the Chapel of St Michael in Vallendar available as the home and meeting place for the newly founded Sodality. Fr Kolb offered him other venues, but in the end agreed to his request, and in the weeks that followed had the ancient Chapel of St Michael prepared for its new purpose.
After the return of the students from their holidays, which had been extended for a month following the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Fr Kentenich remarked on their joy at entering the Sodality Chapel. He told the Sodalists about an idea awakened in him by an article in the “Allgemeine Rundschau”, and revealed that it had become his “favourite idea”.
Should it not be possible that through the Blessed Mother something similar could take place as had happened at the Valley ofPompeii? There had been no extraordinary event there, such as a miracle or an apparition, through which other places of pilgrimage had started. In the meantime the Valley ofPompeii has become known far beyond Italy, and until today has attracted half a million pilgrims each year. Pope John Paul II also visited this place of pilgrimage.
According to his own testimony, in the time that followed Fr Kentenich constantly observed the way the young people in the Sodality dealt withthe chapel and what he had said. From his window in the “Old House” he was able to keep the chapel in view and he was happy to see how often they visited it. As their Confessor and Spiritual Director he noticed that individuals were gradually transformed and progressed in the spiritual life. He observed their growing apostolic zeal in the Sodality and towards the other students in the house. Such observations were augmented when the first Sodalists were called up into the army. Through his extensive correspondence with them, and through his conversations with them during their leave, Fr Kentenich repeatedly became aware of signs that showed him how a number of them, and in particular Joseph Engling, maintained a deep, inner union with the Blessed Mother in her little chapel while they were in the barracks and at the battlefront. They felt protected and sheltered there. As a result he became increasingly certain that these young people had take up his words and made them their own. They wanted to prevail upon the Blessed Mother to transform the little Chapel of St Michael into a place of pilgrimage. Indeed, the conviction grew that the Blessed Mother had accepted their request.
It isn’t specifically a place of pilgrimage for the sick, yet miracles of grace do take place there. Gradually Fr Kentenich gave expression to what he had observed in the young men: They had received graces of transformation, of feeling at home, and of apostolic fruitfulness. For the Founder and the generation that grew up around him, these are Schoenstatt's “three graces of pilgrimage”. He often paraphrased what he observed by describing the formative and educational effect that obviously proceeded from the Blessed Mother in the shrine.
From the first there was a unique interaction between heaven and earth, between supernatural and natural commitment. Completely in keeping with Fr Kentenich’s suggestion, the young men grew in the hope and expectation that the Blessed Mother was present and at work in the little chapel. There was the active commitment of the young Sodalists around Fr Kentenich to co-operate in transforming their Sodality chapel into a place of pilgrimage. To achieve this the Sodalists made their contributions in the form of their self-education. These efforts found visible expression in a cardboard box that appeared on the altar in the chapel in the course of 1915. The Sodalists placed slips of paper into it on which they had written down their efforts. In May 1915 Joseph Engling collected his “May Blossoms” in Mary’s honour for the same intention. In the course of the months that followed the young Sodality developed an expression for this process. To start with they were “contributions”, and later “contributions to Mary’s capital of grace”. The background to this way of thinking was the Church's teaching on its treasury of grace and the spirituality of St Grignion de Montfort, who in his “golden” book on “True Devotion to Mary” guided believers to perfect devotion to Mary, and invited them to place all their merits at her disposal so that she could use them for the salvation of souls.
At this time the chapel, which was originally the cemetery chapel of the medieval cloister at Schoenstatt, was still called the “Chapel of St Michael”. The Provincial Superior, Fr Michael Kolb, had seen to it that a statue of his patron saint was put up in it. Among the Sodalists, however, the question also arose about a picture of Mary for their Sodality chapel, and they tried to obtain one. There were a number of well-documented alternatives on offer, and various initiatives were taken. On 2 April, Good Friday in 1915, the present picture arrived in Schoenstatt, and was put up in the Sodality chapel on 11 April, Low Sunday that year. Since then it has adorned the shrine, and from there it has become known throughout the world as Schoenstatt’s picture of the Blessed Mother.
This was the gift of a teacher who knew about the efforts of his students to obtain a picture of Mary for their Sodality chapel. During the holidays he had found and bought a copy of an Italian picture of Mary in an antique shop in Freiburg. It bore the title “Refuge of Sinners”, and had been painted by the Italian artist, Luigi Crosio, from Turin. Fr Kentenich remembered until the end of his life that the students had not liked the picture. However, the war was raging and there was nothing better to be had. By the end of the war they had become so fond of the picture that no one wanted to give it up again. It had become their picture, and they surrounded it with a light frame from which shone out the trusting words in the tradition of the Marian Sodality: SERVUS MARIAE NUNQUAM PERIBIT – a servant of Mary will never perish (Alphonse Liguori). The wooden light frame, done in fretwork, was a gift from Fritz Esser on the fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Sodality.
Parallel to the search for a picture of Mary the question was asked as to a title for the Blessed Mother. In 1914 Fr Kentenich had read a book by Fr Franz Hattler SJ on Fr Jakob Rem SJ and his Marian Sodality in Ingolstadt. In December of that year he told the students about it. At about the time when the picture of Mary was put up in the Chapel of St Michael, the idea of a parallel between the Ingolstadt Sodality and the Schoenstatt Sodality came alive among the students. The title by which Mary had been honoured in Ingolstadt can be traced back to a mystical experience of Fr Rem while the title “Mater admirabilis” in the Litany of Loreto was being sung. He had always questioned which was Mary’s favourite title. Soon after this experience he told his Sodalists about it and they began to repeat the title “Mater admirabilis” three times as they sang the Litany. Later the invocation was changed to “Mother Thrice Admirable”. This title, by which Mary is invoked as the Mother Thrice Admirable according to the tradition of the Ingolstadt Sodality, spread in southern Germany. The Sodality in Schoenstatt adopted this title in April 1915 in the hope that it would become a similarly graced Sodality as that in Ingolstadt. As a result the title became a programme and has to be understood in connection with the Ingolstadt-Schoenstatt parallel.
In the year of the fifteenth anniversary of the foundation the audacious saying about “the shadow of the shrine” was first uttered. During a conference for Secondary School (Gymnasium) students in Easter Week 1929 Fr Kentenich gave expression to thebelief and conviction that had grown within him in the course of the first fifteen years: “In the shadow of the shrine the fate of the Church in the coming years will be decided!” In the same talk, and later on various occasions, he enlarged on and varied this prophetic statement. He pointed out on numerous occasions that this conviction had grown in him through faith in Divine Providence. Unless we take this faith and conviction seriously, it is impossible to understand Schoenstatt’s history and the life of its Founder.
Already a year prior to this – but intensified in the years that followed by the consistent growth of the Movement – there were many and varied initiatives to make the picture of the Mother Thrice Admirable [MTA] of Schoenstatt better known. Wayside shrines were erected in many places, and the MTA picture was put up in chapels and the side chapels of churches. It is remarkable that when Fr Kentenich personally undertook the solemn enthronement of the MTA picture, he did not speak so much about the “picture” as about the “shrine”. It was obviously his view that by this act a new place had been started where the MTA could distribute grace.