18 June 2025 · 2025-06 newsletter
In the coming weeks we celebrate two days of remembrance which are important in our Schoenstatt Family history.
June 29 Feast of Saints Peter & Paul.
The wooden carved statues of Saints Peter and Paul are found in our Schoenstatt shrines, to the left and right of the Shrine altar, just below the image of our Mother Thrice Admirable. They are a reminder to us that Schoenstatt is an apostolic movement, and we are all called to be apostolic and to serve the Church with our unique, individual gifts and talents.
The statues were placed in the Original Shrine in 1935 for the 100th anniversary of the founding of St. Vincent Pallotti’s Catholic Apostolate. They also remind us that Mary is the Queen of Apostles and that the Shrine is a new Cenacle.
(Adapted from 200 questions: Fr. J. Niehaus)
Priestly Ordination of Father Kentenich, 8 July 1910
On Friday, July 8, 1910, Joseph Kentenich was ordained in the house chapel of the Pallottine Limburg Mission House together with seven other young men.
The following Sunday, July 10, in the same house chapel, Fr. Kentenich celebrated his solemn First Mass. Fr. Kolb, the provincial superior, was the assisting priest.
A solemn First Mass in his home parish in Gymnich followed on July 24. The Mass was held in St. Cunibert’s Church and afterwards his family gathered to celebrate.
Over 50 years later, in 1962, Father Kentenich commented on the spirit in which he embarked on the priesthood. Speaking of himself in the third person he said: Throughout his life he was inspired by a single great ideal: God and souls. For him all else was secondary. All else was resolutely ordered and subjected to this great idea of his life. Hence, he always sought to open souls for God and unite them inseparably with God. And this made it imperative for him to see to it that the soul be opened and remain open – wherever possible to its inmost depths – to God and the divine.
(Adapted from: “Brushstrokes of a Father”, Volume 1, Fr. Jonathan Niehaus)
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