30 September 2025 · 2025-09 newsletter
Joseph was a member of the founding generation of Schoenstatt. He came from a remote village in Eastern Prussia (then Germany, now Poland) and was a student at the Pallottine School in Schoenstatt.
Although Joseph was not present at the Shrine on the 18th of October 1914, he entered deeply into the covenant of love with Our Lady and made Schoenstatt his life. His diary notes and letters are a pure and profound reflection of the promptings given by Father Kentenich.
Soon after the founding of Schoenstatt, the first sodalists from the Marian Sodality were drafted into military service, from school benches and the security of the little chapel near the House of Studies, into the war. Joseph was one of these young sodalist men.
Joseph offered his physical limitations, successes and vast experience of unsuccessful apostolic commitment, his self-education, and the hardships of his life as a soldier on the battlefields of World War I for the growth and spread of Schoenstatt. On May 31, 1918, while on the battlefield he offered his life for this intention. This consecration has now become known as the Joseph Engling Act.
The axis of his short life was a living faithfulness to the Mother Thrice Admirable in her shrine and to the founder. The offer of the sacrifice of his life to Our Lady was offered expressly for the Movement founded by his spiritual father – Father Kentenich. God accepted this sacrifice of his life on the evening of 4th October 1918.
It has long been the conviction of the Schoenstatt Family, that Joseph Engling is the most outstanding of Fr. Kentenich’s young co-workers of that earliest period when the Movement was being founded. He sacrificed his life for the Movement and for Schoenstatt’s mission.
Joseph had lived the covenant to such a degree that he became, in Father Kentenich’s words, “the classic example of the new man in the new community” whom Schoenstatt wanted to fashion. Father Kentenich called Joseph the “founding document lived” and already in the year after Joseph’s death, in 1919, he began to publish his letters and the notes from his diary in the Schoenstatt magazine “MTA”.
“Schoenstatt stands and falls with people who really strive for holiness and who bring this striving for holiness into connection with our shrine.”
(J. Kentenich)
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