14 October 2022 · 2022-10 newsletter
A. Schoenstatt’s Pre-Founding Document
B. Schoenstatt’s Founding Document
A practical faith in Divine Providence is one of the messages of Schoenstatt along with the message of the Covenant of Love and mission consciousness. The following articles exemplify how Father Kentenich’s constant attention to the will of God in all things, allowed him to discern the voice of the times and see the open doors that God was showing him through the events and situations of the time. And through this attention to the voice of God, we now have our international Schoenstatt Movement.
A. Schoenstatt’s Pre-Founding Document
Background: At the beginning of the new school year in September 1912, the students had moved to the “New House” (the House of Studies) situated in Schoenstatt.
Father Kentenich found himself appointed spiritual director of this New Minor Seminary at Schoenstatt on October 25th, 1912. This appointment had come as a complete surprise to Fr. Kentenich as he was just six weeks into the new school year as a Latin and German teacher.
He had just two days to prepare his first talk for the older classes. He had been observing the boys quietly for some time and had perceived the revolution brewing among them as a result of the handbook of “house statutes” that each boy had been given at the start of the school year when they had moved into this new House of Studies. This handbook contained 120 individual regulations. As notes were prohibited by the rules, they were “accidently” dropped by students in the halls so teachers would find them. In the hallway Father Kentenich had found one of the notes the boys had left: “A house without joy must be closed immediately.” Another said, “We want to be free like our forefathers were!” He realized that within the boys there was a hidden longing for more freedom.
Wasn’t this atmosphere of rebellion actually a typical sign of the modern time, a sign of the evolution of a “new type of person” that demands freedom and self-determination? Could God be opening a door, wanting him to pass on to the boys what he himself had to struggle so hard for and that was burning in his soul? A plan soon matured in him that he would reveal to them right at the beginning of his opening address. But would they understand him and go along? He didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes he had experienced in his own education. He wanted to present a project to them, the “program” he had in mind. He wanted to show them a youthful ideal, but they should make a free decision. That was important to him. So he wrote, that he wanted to do “nothing, absolutely nothing without your full consent.”
They would have to learn to make their own decisions, develop their self-confidence and self-esteem, and lead themselves. “Self-education” was the keyword. If he could succeed in making the goal of “true inner freedom” clear to them, an ideal that was close to his own heart, he would be able to help them become independent of external circumstances which they – he and they couldn’t change for the time being. In solidarity with the students, he encapsulated his whole program into one single sentence: “We want to learn to educate ourselves to become firm, free, priestly personalities!” and “under the protection of Mary”. Mary should take over part of the education. He decided that this program should occupy them for the whole year – if the boys went along.
Two days later on Sunday October 27, 1912, he gave the talk which has since become known as Schoenstatt’s Pre-founding Document
As Father Kentenich said in his opening address.
Then came my appointment as spiritual director – entirely without my doing. Hence, it must be God’s will. I am resigned to it, and I am determined to fulfill my duties to all of you and to each individual as perfectly as possible.
Because of his awareness of the students state of rebellion over the strict house rules that had been imposed on them, Fr. Kentenich offered the boys his service and his heart: He said: “I now place myself entirely at your disposal with all that I am and have, my knowledge and ignorance, my ability and inability, but above all, my heart.”
He then turned the students longing for freedom into a program that would engage the young men in a positive way. He added: “What is our aim then? Our future relationship depends on it. I will therefore state it, short and to the point: Under the protection of Mary we want to learn to educate ourselves to become firm, free, priestly personalities.
We want to learn. Not only you, but also I. We want to learn from each other. For we are never done learning, especially not the art of self-education, which represents the work, the activity which will absorb our whole lifetime. We want to learn, not merely in theory: this and that would be good, or nice, or even necessary. No, we must also learn in practice, we must put our hand to the plough every day, every hour. How did we learn to walk? One learns to walk by walking, to love by loving; therefore we have to learn to educate ourselves through the constant practice of self-education”.
The boys were impressed by this first talk from their new spiritual director. They hadn’t heard anything like it previously. Some noted in particular how often Fr. Kentenich had used the word “we” and “us”. Not one single time had he said, “you must” or anything similar. They accepted the plan and gradually with the help of their spiritual director learnt how to grow towards more religious aims.
Taking up the challenge of self-education was only the first step. As Schoenstatt developed, its accent on forming “modern saints” inspired it to find ways to form the modern person who is, in many ways, dramatically different from the persons of previous eras.
This accent on self-education and the formation of a community of “firm, free, priestly personalities” is still very much part of Schoenstatt today.
As the event which initiated the process leading to Schoenstatt’s founding in 1914, and as an authentic expression of Schoenstatt’s spirit, this talk has long been known as Schoenstatt’s “Pre-founding Document”.
In retrospect, Father Kentenich stated that the Pre-Founding Document contains ‘as in a seed, all that later became a reality in Schoenstatt’s history.’ They reveal the seed of Schoenstatt’s practical faith in divine providence, a faith in God our Father who speaks to us through the law of the open door, revealing to us his plan of love and mercy.
B. 18th October 1914 – the Founding of Schoenstatt
Background: On August 1, 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. In a matter of days practically all of Europe had entered into the battle, and World War I had begun its deadly course. Whatever urgency Father Kentenich had sensed as educator in the two preceding years was now intensified at the outbreak of the war. Within days members of the graduated senior class were inducted into the army. Father Kentenich was immediately in contact with them by letter. It did not take long to see that army life would demand every ounce of effort and grace if their chosen high ideals were to continue to be lived.
It was during this time that a magazine article fell into Father Kentenich’s hands. In the afternoons, Father Kentenich normally went from his office to the library, where several newspapers and magazines could be found lying around on the table. On the 18th July he picked up the German newspaper Allgemeine Rundschau (General Review) and leafed through it, skimming the headlines. “A City of Life on a City of the Dead.” That sounded promising somehow. As he began to read the article, it suddenly piqued his interest. It was about a lawyer who had been a non-believer, a materialist, and a freemason, who then converted and felt he must turn his life around. By way of prayers and sacrifices, he erected near the ruins of the ancient city of of Pompeii, a pilgrimage place (Our Lady of the Rosary) and a care-centre for the children of criminals.
The shrine there was of relatively recent origin, only having been begun in 1872. This lawyer was Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), who had become an advocate of the rosary. And now, each year, many thousands of people made pilgrimages to this place – which had become a Marian pilgrimage place only through the trustful praying of the rosary.
The impact of this article was important. Father Kentenich was already trying to grasp the plans of Divine Providence for the sodality, and the war now added acute concerns about how this work, showing signs of becoming a real blessing to many, could continue when many of the oldest students were being called up to serve in the war. After reading the article he began to ask in a very direct way: is God not calling us to do something similar?
Father Kentenich continued to think about what he had just read, about how through human commitment to prayer and on the initiative of this lawyer Bartolo Longo, many conversions had taken place there. People had changed their lives after going there. What if God also wanted something like this here in Schoenstatt in this little chapel? What if Mary would let herself be “drawn down” through prayer and sacrifice? What if she wanted to unfold her motherly education even more from here – the education into firm, free priestly personalities that he also desired for the boys? …. Mary would give the boys both security and moral and religious resilience in the midst of this difficult situation where what mattered was to show character and profile. Yes, she had to come and she would come!
What impressed Father Kentenich about this article was that this place of grace was not initiated by an apparition or physical miracle, but by someone inspired by Divine Providence. Here was a place not only of religious, but also social renewal. Here was a place of miracles of inner transformation. Later he would especially quote the closing lines of the article: “How did it all happen? Yes, that’s the miracle of it all. If the Madonna di Pompeii had not worked irrefutable miracles…. the greatest miracle would be that an unknown lawyer in Italy could found a place of pilgrimage on the ruins of a pagan city.”
Could it be that God wanted such a place of grace, a place of pilgrimage to rise out of the little Schoenstatt sodality, transforming the little chapel now foreseen to be the sodality’s new home? The question gripped Father Kentenich, and he entered a period of struggle for God’s will. It would mean daring to believe that human initiative could “call down” the divine to form a place of grace. The very fact that it involved a pilgrimage place posed an even greater unknown. It meant the creation of a place of grace with importance for circles even beyond the Schoenstatt sodality. But on the other hand, if Mary had been persuaded by the simple work of Bartolo Longo, could she not be persuaded here, too? The thoughts and questions went back and forth in his mind and he couldn’t dismiss them. “How often in world history have not small and insignificant beginnings been the source of great and greatest accomplishments? Why could this not also hold true in our case?” he thought.
Father Kentenich didn’t confide his deliberations to anyone because it was all still a matter of groping and searching. But in the following weeks, an inner certainty gradually grew within him. “These constantly recurring thoughts don’t come from me alone!” As crazy as it sounded, it seemed to him as if Mary herself, driven by compassion with such a battered and broken Europe, was knocking very softly and asking to be let in.
Without any further assurance of the rightness of this step than the conviction that God had spoken in a newspaper article – and was speaking through the small but distinctive beginning of the Schoenstatt sodality – Father Kentenich finally came to the hard-fought conclusion that it really was God’s will. It was a leap of faith that he would later call the most difficult decision of his life, even more difficult than the decision of January 20, 1942, when he freely gave up a chance to escape his deportation to the concentration camp. In his long life no other decision would demand more faith than this yes to God’s will – a yes lacking the benefit of anything more than the faintest glimmer of divine light.
If this was indeed God’s plan then he would have to wait for the reaction of the boys. …..And so he began drafting the talk that had been maturing for so long within him. He polished every sentence, crossed things out, added things and then let it rest for some days before picking it up again. It was as if he sensed what a far-reaching significance this talk, which he planned to give at the first Sunday meeting of the sodality, on the 18th October 1914, would one day have.
(Adapted from: “New Vision and Life”, Fr. Jonathan Niehaus, Pp.89-92, and “Joseph Kentenich: A Life on the Edge of the Volcano”, Dorothea M. Schlickmann, Pp.93-95)
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