19 July 2022 · 2022-07 newsletter
“Schoenstatt’s Way: Authentic Witness to Holiness”
Dear Schoenstatt Family and Friends,
We are now well into the winter season and I send you warm greetings and blessings from the Shrine for this July Covenant day. In our newsletter last month we looked at an excerpt from a talk by Fr. Kentenich in which he spoke about the Covenant of Love with Our Blessed Mother, as a Covenant of Love also with the Triune God.
This month we want to look at how our Covenant of Love helps us to become the “new person” who helps to fulfil Schoenstatt’s mission for the Church and world.
Our Schoenstatt Covenant of Love aims at bringing us into fervent union with the Blessed Mother. She is in the foreground. As her covenant partners, we belong completely to her and should be at home in her as she educates us. “The new person” should be formed in and through this covenant of love.
However, this fervent union is not an end in itself. It also serves as a task and mission for others, for Schoenstatt, the Church and world. The disciples have to become apostles. So the spirituality and message of the Covenant of Love naturally gives rise to the message of faith in our mission. This, in its turn, means that we should be striving to be authentic witnesses to holiness through our Schoenstatt mission and our Schoenstatt spirituality.
Schoenstatt’s Second Founding Document, was written by Father Kentenich from Switzerland as he could not be present for the October celebrations in Schoenstatt that year. Because of the situation at that time, it was published as “Words Befitting the Hour” on 18th October 1939. The following paragraphs from that document are texts that speak of faith in our mission.
52. Take great care to cultivate the awareness that we have a divine mission and are God’s instruments!
54. All along it has been a law that we have taken for granted that only those people and communities may exercise a profounder influence in God’s kingdom who have been given a distinctive calling and mission. This is proven not only by the priests and prophets of the Old Testament, but also by our Lord, the apostles, the understanding of the Church, and the feeling of Catholic people.
60. Today we are surprised that our young Founder Generation was borne by such a profound awareness of its mission and instrumentality 25 years ago. We are justified in asking for the reasons that induced it to do so. We know them. Many of us would hardly have managed with them at the time. In 1919, at the end of the World War and after five years of existence and fruitfulness, we were better able to understand the argument that confirmed this divine mission. We have heard it and repeated it on countless occasions. It revolves around the well-known statement: the insignificance of the instrument, the magnitude of the difficulties and the magnitude of the success. What we have battled through and achieved since 1919 confirms this argument in a very profound way, and hence also our faith in our mission and awareness that we are instruments. So we have every reason to thank most sincerely all those whom Divine Providence has used to create difficulties for us. Without them we would not stand so steadfastly today in our joyful and victorious faith, hope and love, when so much is collapsing, and the paralysis of discouragement is so widespread.
61. It is now up to us to deepen this faith in our mission through prayer and studying the history of our Family and our times.
62. The more, and the more effectively, we do this, the greater and richer will be the fruits we will harvest. Our awareness of our inner dependence on the living God will grow. Our mistrust of our own strength and purely human means will increase. Our sense of being sheltered and at home, our calm and security in God, will consolidate us and give us sureness of touch. Our trust in the victory of divine forces in the Family and through the Family will become invincible, so that in the end we will be able to say with utter conviction: If God is with us, who can be against us?
63. All who are deeply filled and gripped by the Blank Cheque they have given, will live with all their soul from this faith that they have been given a divine mission, and the awareness of their instrumentality. It would be absurd to invest all the abilities of body and soul, all our intellectual and material goods, indeed our entire lives, in a work that promises absolutely no earthly benefits, unless this faith existed as a major power in the background. In order to intensify it, let us examine the life of our Josef Engling in detail and open ourselves to its influence. Without this divine element his life and work would simply be incomprehensible and inconceivable.
(Kentenich Reader, Volume II, Pp203-206)
The Covenant of Love with our Mother Thrice Admirable and the Schoenstatt spirituality we have received from our father and founder, help us in striving to be authentic witnesses to holiness in our families, our workplaces and among our community.
We ask our MTA to help us deepen our faith in our Schoenstatt mission through prayer and studying our Schoenstatt spirituality.
We also ask Our Blessed Mother to take special care of those in our own families and the Schoenstatt Family, who are struggling at this time with illness or in any other ways.
Wishing you many blessings and graces from our Shrines on this Covenant Day,
United in our Covenant,
Shirley Hall
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