19 October 2021 · 2021-10 newsletter
Family, be what you are: Domestic Church
Dear Schoenstatt Family and Friends,
On this very special Covenant day when we remember and celebrate the foundation of Schoenstatt on 18th October 1914, we pray that Our Blessed Mother will send us all many blessings and graces from her Schoenstatt Shrines, and in particular, from the original shrine in Schoenstatt, Germany
When we renew our covenant of love today, we hear the words that Father Kentenich spoke on October 23, 1966:
“We renew our covenant of love, but we renew it with the intention that this covenant of love should become more and more and deeper and deeper, the foundation of our lives, the meaning of our lives, the norm for our lives and the form for our lives.
Practically speaking, this means that the covenant of love with the Blessed Mother – allow me to repeat this again – as the expression of the covenant of love, the safeguard and the means for the covenant of love with our Lord and with the Triune God should become the foundation of our lives more than before, the norm and form for our lives.
Indeed, the covenant of love with the Blessed Mother is not something unimportant, something accidental. Whatever is not connected with God, whatever does not proceed from him, whatever does not lead to him, is really meaningless today.”
When speaking of the great task he undertook, together with that small group of boys on 18th October 1914, Father Kentenich said:
“Allow me to state repeatedly that I would never have had the courage, and I would not have it now, to attempt to carry out our great task unless our shrine, with its intrinsic value and symbolic meaning, had taken on that place in the whole Family which it obviously has according to God’s unmistakable plan. God’s plan and the shrine essentially belong together.
(JK 13 May, 1952)
Father Kentenich often said, “No one will be lost who is loyal to his covenant of love” and he also said, “If you look for me you will find me in the Shrine.”
On this Covenant Day, may we be united in Covenant loyalty with our Blessed Mother, with our Father and Founder and with each other:
“One Heart in the Father, for the Family of God.”
Shirley Hall
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