17 April 2024 · 2024-04 newsletter
Do you remember the day you made your first consecration to our Blessed Mother? Do you remember the details of that day?
For Father Kentenich, Thursday 12th April 1894 was a turning point in his life. On this day Katarina Kentenich, accompanied by Henriette Esser, took her 8½-year-old son to the orphanage in Oberhausen because she could not care for him anymore because of her work.
This was a very difficult decision for Katarina, and she was deeply distressed at having to leave Joseph there. Joseph was also finding it very difficult and cried bitterly at having to be left there. Katarina took Joseph and Henriette to the orphanage chapel. They went up to the statue of the Mother of God and there she prayed and entrusted Joseph to the Mother of God, consecrating him to Mary. She prayed out loud that Mary would care for him in a motherly way, and she should be his mother as Katarina could no longer do it. It seemed that Joseph took in all that was happening. Katarina took the only piece of jewelry she had, her First Communion cross, and placed it around the neck of the statue.
Joseph had indeed taken in what this consecration meant and he never forgot it. This happening in the orphanage chapel was so incisive for him that he came back to it his whole life long. Years later, when he took up his task as spiritual director at the Vallendar boarding school, responsible for the formation of the boys there, he felt immediately urged to tell them something about this event of 12th April 1894 – but without revealing that it was a story about himself. This consecration to Mary became a central experience of his childhood and even the key moment of his whole life.
Later Joseph underlined that his entire life’s work was based on this early consecration, in which he personally and deeply participated. He said that since then, Mary took a key role in his life. “She herself personally formed me and educated me from my ninth year of life on.”
What was it about this consecration to Mary that touched him so deeply and was able to gain such power over his life? This had been a personal experience of the reality that would determine the direction of his life even more than before: In the midst of the painful separation from his beloved mother, he experienced through Mary the marvelous nearness of God…. This experience was so strong that the impression of it never let go of him, even in times of crisis. Later references show that he had experienced through Mary what God is really like. It was an encounter with the “mercifully loving Father God who cannot do otherwise but love us inconceivably” as he later formulated it.
In January 1955, Fr. Kentenich also spoke about the impact of this event in a letter to Fr. Menningen in which he said: “someday I will tell you a secret about my life which happened to me in my 8th or 9th year. To it I personally trace back the entire Schoenstatt Work, especially its most unique source – the covenant of love between the MTA and Schoenstatt (….). It was not a mystical experience. My personal life was never touched this way, at least if one means anything extraordinary. (….) It was really something quite simple.
(Adapted from “Joseph Kentenich, A Life on the edge of the Volcano, Dorothea M. Schlickmann)
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