17 February 2025 · 2025-02 newsletter
United in the Covenant – Pilgrims of Hope
Dear Schoenstatt Family and Friends,
Greetings and blessings for this Covenant Day – 18th February. In this Jubilee Year of the Church, we continue to strive to be ‘United in the Covenant”, as “Pilgrims of Hope”.
A week before he died, on 7 September 1968, Father Kentenich wrote a message to the members of the Schoenstatt Family who were taking part in the 82nd German Catholic Congress in Essen.
This message is thus seen within the Schoenstatt Family as a his “last testimony” to the mission he believed he had been given for himself and for his Schoenstatt family. Looking back on Schoenstatt’s history within the context of the times, and in view of the Church, he expressed this conviction. In part he said:
”We take it for granted that we owe the existence and fruitfulness of our family to our covenant of love with our dear Blessed Mother under the title of Mother Thrice Admirable, Queen and Victress of Schoenstatt. She has cared for us in the extraordinarily difficult testing of the past years through the authorities of the Church and the harsh Nazi persecution. Now, as then, we therefore revolve around the image of our foundress, leader, and educator, and around her Shrines. We use every opportunity to deepen our love for her in every way and to surrender ourselves willingly to her wise guidance and education.
Year after year since 1914 we have committed ourselves increasingly through our covenant of love with the MTA to carrying out the meaning of the motto: With hope and joy, confident in the victory, we go with Mary into the new era! Throughout the past years we have directed our gaze unwaveringly to the shores of a new era for the Church and world. This is how all that has been written over the years has to be seen.
Our covenant of love is an obligation to both partners. We wanted to surrender ourselves completely to Mary and allow her to educate us. And she, the great educator of the people and of peoples, accepted the obligation to draw us to herself from her Shrines in order to educate us to become useful instruments in her hands for the Marian formation of the coming world into Christ to the glory of the Father.
We know how both partners carried out their task. All of us have experienced it for ourselves to a greater or lesser degree. She has shown that she is not only the masterly educator of the elite and the masses from her Shrine; as the great Missionary she has not only worked continuous miracles of helping people to find a spiritual home, transformation and fruitfulness; she has also proved on a small scale in the many and varied formations of our Family that she is the brilliant reformer of human society, and the one who crushes the serpent in the battle for Christ and against all diabolical powers.
It is not without reason that she is praised as the terribilis acies bene ordinata – a terrible army in battle order. Our morning prayer in ‘Heavenwards’ leads us to give thanks with all our hearts for this when it prays:
We give you thanks for all the gifts we have received in such abundance:
for choosing Schoenstatt
as the place of Christ’s rebirth
and the place where you radiate into the world
the glories of our Mother,
so that streams of love
may pour forth to warm cold hearts.We hope that we shall hear the answer of our partner in the covenant: This is the instrument I have chosen. I swear to God, I will never desert it! This oath applies to the whole family, but also to each member of the family. Let us go out with this attitude into the dark future. We do so with the motto, “With hope and joy, confident in the victory, we go with Mary into the new era!”
I firmly believe that no one will be lost who remains faithful to the covenant of love!”
(Kentenich Reader Vol.1: Essen Talk, P283-286)
May we continue to strive to live faithfully our Covenant of Love, filled with hope and secure in the certainty that Our Blessed Mother will always remain with us, supporting us in all we do.
Shirley Hall
Filed underNewsletter · Reflections