Schoenstatt – Reaching out Category

Interview with Manuela Baumgartner, winner of the “2016 Prize of Austria’s Religious Communities” award. She is paediatric consultant for children and adolescents, and member of the international leadership of the Schoenstatt Family Federation • It almost got lost in the Christmas rush, yet this news is really Christmassy. For the third time the Austrian communities for men and women religious have awarded the “Prize of Austria’s Religious Communities” for “achievements at the interface between religious communities and society”. During the Day for religious communities in the Cardinal Koenig House inRead More
ECUADOR, José Leonardo Salazar Calderón, International high-mountain Guide •         In 2002, I began my candidacy as a high-mountain guide. My objective was to climb Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest volcano and mountain. I reached the Whymper refuge, and I met the Blessed Mother, and I entrusted myself to her before departing; for mountain climbing believers, this is a ritual. Years later, in 2008, my parents joined the Schoenstatt Apostolic Movement.  One day I went with them to Mass at the Alangasi Shrine. When I saw the picture of the Blessed Mother, sheRead More
PARAGUAY, Maria Fischer with Ani Souberlich • “They told me, and I forgot it, I saw it, and I understood it; I did it, and I learned it.” This how it is every day in what the youths do at Mother of Tupãrendá House. Today we learned to make buns for hot dogs, bread for pork loin and our invention: big bread– “The size of the hunger that we always have, and it has no end just like that of anyone our age. The truth is that it is deliciousRead More
ECUADOR, Montse de Martínez • On the radiant morning of 8 November, 450 students from the Schools of the Charitable Society of Women from Guayaquil sealed their Covenant of Love with the Mother Thrice Admirable of Schoenstatt. It was the third consecutive year; 1,330 youths, full of joy and good resolutions for our heavenly Mother, have already consecrated themselves. This initiative emerged from a life group of the Family Branch “With Mary faithful pilgrims, as a family, toward the Father,” the women also belong to the Mothers’ Branch. Through MargaritaRead More
COSTA RICA, by Rudolf Sauter and Maria Fischer • This Thursday, a 7.0 earthquake, with its epicenter right off El Salvador’s Pacific coast, shook the Central American territory hours after hurricane Otto entered Nicaragua from the Caribbean. Within a few hours, these small Central American countries – Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica – many of them with a high degree of poverty, found themselves with quake damage in the west and a hurricane in the east. Panamá, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica… are countries that sound “familiar”Read More
By Maria Fischer, with Ana Echevarría  and Mercedes Bonorino • It began with a wayside shrine; it was an incredibly simple wooden wayside shrine, with a plaque of the Mother Thrice Admirable of Schoenstatt. It is a wayside shrine, which on 8 December 1965, at the closing day of Vatican Council II, served as a fundamental stone for the symbolic blessing of the Schoenstatt International Shrine in Rome. A wayside shrine kept alive for decades, sometimes in great solitude and tested by fires, rain or heat, that desire and promiseRead More
SPAIN, schoenstatt.org editorial team • Sunday 13 November. All over the world, the Holy Doors were closing. The Holy Year of Mercy is drawing to an end…this year has offered Christians countless opportunities for grace, the grace to be merciful like the Father, the grace of needing and being worthy of the Father’s mercy, the grace of a daily, personal, deep and real encounter with Jesus, in the poor, and the grace of showing him how we love him through our works of mercy towards his and our friends, theRead More
ITALY,  Fr. Rolando G. Montes de Oca Valero • Being a Pilgrim Mother missionary presupposes allowing her to choose the methods. I expected my brother, Marwan – a Maronite rite priest with whom I know at the University – would return the picture with more “solemnity”. She had visited him the previous week, accompanying him at an important time; he was grateful and was willing to “return the visit.” When he took the Pilgrim Mother books out of his backpack and placed them in my hands, along with a “ThankRead More
SPAIN, Elena Martín Otín • It has already been ten years since the birth of Betania Spain. What began as a small reality for four separated women, under the protection of its founder María Luisa Erhardt, and Fr. Gabriel García Serrano, our counselor, today is huge reality for more than 200 women integrated into twelve groups. They are united by the common factor of their marriage break-ups. Many of them are in the process of an ecclesial annulment of marriage, or they have resolved this; others are divorced or inRead More
ARGENTINA, Estela Rodríguez • On 8 November, I read an article about our beloved “Talita Kum” Youth Missions on this website. I am from Corrientes, a beautiful province in northeastern Argentina, very close to the end of the world (as Pope Francis expressed). It is a place that loves Mary in spirit and soul. I want to share my testimony with you about the blessings we received at that mission in Caá Catí, 126 km from my city. Truly Divine Providence was very greatly at work. A year ago, aRead More