21 August 2023 · 2023-08 newsletter
Dear Schoenstatt Family and Friends,
Blessings and greetings for this Covenant Day – 18th August. Last Tuesday, the 15th of August, we celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
This Feast Day should be a sign of great hope and joy for us all because it is a reminder that God not only showed his merciful love for Mary throughout her life, but he also shows His merciful love for us during our life. It is an affirmation of the dignity of all human life.
We see this dignity reflected especially in the life of Our Lady and in the way in which she always responded to the will of God with a joyful “yes”. It is Mary’s wholehearted willingness to participate in God’s purpose that makes her bodily assumption into heaven a beacon of hope for everyone.
Mary fulfilled the mission given to her by the Heavenly Father and became a perfect and authentic witness to holiness.
In speaking about Mary’s role for mankind, Father Kentenich said in 1954:
When we now ask Our Lord why He draws His Mother so closely to Himself, why He united her so intimately with His own Person and His work – all in all, why He places her so much in the foreground that He would give her to us from the cross as His last will and testament, then He will answer very clearly and certainly: It is the plan of the Eternal Father.
God created human society in the image of the Triune God. Just as the Blessed Trinity is bound together in the manner of a family, human society should also be a family. In this family Mary is the Mother. ……. Mary is not like a signpost on the road which points the direction but then stays behind without accompanying the hiker. Just as a mother in the natural order takes her children with her to God, so does the heavenly Mother. The more we are at home in her heart, the more quickly and surely will she find us a home with herself in God.
God could also draw us directly to Himself without a magnet, which means He could give us graces without Mary. But since He has decided it differently, we must follow the law which He has given. St. Bernard tells us: God simply determined that all graces should come to us through Mary. And Leo XIII points out that graces flow from the heart of Mary. God gives us the graces, Our Lord has merited them for us, and the Blessed Virgin intercedes them for us.
Because God has decided it should be that way, we are simply dependent on her and her love for us, and our love for her cannot be great enough. But, once again, that does not mean that whoever dedicates himself first to the Sacred Heart and then makes his consecration to the Blessed Mother does so because Our Lady could or would give him something which Our Lord cannot give. By no means!
Whoever consecrates himself to both Hearts, whoever turns to both with his plea, is merely conforming to the order of grace and drawing diligently from all the sources of grace which God has made available to us according to His plan. It is always God who gives us grace; it is always the God-Man who has merited the graces for us; and it is always the Blessed Mother who intercedes for us and who, in a certain sense, has even co-merited them for us under the cross. Therefore, whoever gives and consecrates himself to Our Lady and who prays to her gives a wholehearted yes to the complete plan of God, and he may consequently expect an immense divine blessing.
From: “Mary, Our Mother and Educator”, P.39-40
On this August Covenant Day, we ask our Blessed Mother to take us more deeply into the covenant of love with her, so that we may respond more wholeheartedly to the will of God and share more fully in her mission for Schoenstatt and the Church.
Blessed Mother……
Let us walk like you through life,
let us mirror you forever,
strong and noble, meek and mild,
peace and love be our endeavour.
Walk in us through our world,
make it ready for the Lord. Amen(Heavenwards, p.171)
Could I ask you to also pray for those members of our Schoenstatt Family who are struggling in any way, especially with illness, either themselves or members of their family. May our Mother Thrice Admirable, Queen and Victress of Schoenstatt, send them grace and blessings from her shrine in this time of suffering.
United in Covenant loyalty, Shirley Hall
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