28 October 2025 · 2025-10 newsletter
United in the Covenant – Pilgrims of Hope
Dear Schoenstatt Family and Friends,
This month we remember and celebrate the foundation of Schoenstatt on 18th October 1914. We pray that Our Blessed Mother will send us many blessings and graces from her Schoenstatt Shrines, and in particular, from the original shrine in Schoenstatt, Germany.
Father Kentenich’s desire was always to lead those entrusted to his care to Our Lady, for then he was sure they would come to the Triune God…
He did this, by time and again pointing out that the covenant of love with the Mother of God is an expression, means, and protection of the covenant of love with the Triune God. Everything comes from Him and returns to Him. The Mother of God does not keep anyone for herself but leads everyone to the Triune God.
"The Blessed Mother has given us to each other, and we want to be faithful to each other: in one another, with one another, for one another in the heart of God."
(J. Kentenich, 20.8.1947)
“As our Mother, Mary has gone the way before us which each of us must tread without exception. “Ecce Mater tua!” (Behold your Mother). Our Mother is, at the same time, also our Educator ….and knows that the insecurity and fear which God has permitted to overshadow modern man is intended to make him more quickly similar to the crucified Saviour and both usable and fruitful as seed for a new world. She knows and adheres to the immutable law that the kingdom of heaven endures violence (cf. Mt 11,12), that it therefore cannot be gained by playing games or seeking after pleasure, but only by severe self-discipline.
She cannot and will not give us a dispensation from the decree which God laid down after the first sin, that human life here on earth is to be a strenuous warfare against the inclination towards evil in our hearts …. Her task as Mother is to preserve us from the many dangers that await body and soul.
Her office as Educator urges her to help us and educate us, so that the tormenting insecurity and fear which has swept inevitably over the nations becomes a way by which we are more quickly freed from all that is not of God, and in Him alone seek and find the lasting tranquillity and peace of a home and a nest.
Above all, she wants to prove and glorify herself as Educator by inspiring us to surrender ourselves unreservedly to her as her instruments in a covenant of love with her. She wants to inspire us into letting ourselves be formed by her into an alter Christus (another Christ) and an altera Maria (another Mary), a little Mary who is able to answer to the distress of modern life and times with a death leap of intellect, heart, and will into the Heart of God the Father and who never wearies of offering self as an instrument for the redemption of the world, just as the Helpmate of the Lord has done before us. “
From: Mary, Mother and Educator, Fr. J. Kentenich (P.114-115)
In gratitude to Father Kentenich, our father and founder, and in union with our Blessed Mother, may we be ever more deeply united in our Covenant of Love and renewed in our mission for Schoenstatt and the Church: “Loyalty for loyalty, heroic loyalty for heroic loyalty”
United in our covenant,
Shirley Hall
Filed underNewsletter · Reflections