SCOTLAND, Fr. Michael Savage. I am sure that all of us and certainly every family has a special photograph that is treasured in their family album or shoe box. It might not be very well taken, it could be blurred or over exposed but it remains special because of what it represents. A special event in the life of a family. The first picture of a new born child, the only image we might have of a dear grandmother, a special celebration. Here is one such image that is part of our Scottish Schoenstatt family photograph album. Like I said it is a bit blurred and being taken during a South African summer the contrasts are high and the colour a bit washed out. It is perhaps a pity the photograph was not better composed but such are the pictures that are precious. This image was taken on the feast of the Holy Innocents in 1961. It shows an event that is the reason we are sitting here today in the Scottish Schoenstatt shrine with a formation centre just across the car park. This image if you look very closely is of Sr Xavera leaving movement house in Cape Town and is about to be driven down to the harbour to catch the boat to Britain and on up to Glasgow. Unbeknown to many people in Scotland a whirl wind was about the hit them and life would never be the same again.
Sr Xavera entered the Schoenstatt Sisters back in the early 1940s. She entered at a critical time for the movement. It was the same period when Fr Kentenich was taken prisoner by the Gestapo. She was part of a generation of sisters who experienced close up the dangers of living your faith in the face of not just hostile but murderous forces. These forces wanted to crush people’s spirit into submission and annihilate faith in God replacing it with a twisted human construct. Fr Kentenich at that time had a unshakable but realistic sense of divine providence that God leads us and teaches us through world events. Particularly from the foundation of the movement in 1914 he believed that Schoenstatt was founded as a response to the needs of our times. Our Blessed Lady under the title of our Mother thrice admirable was calling people through the shrine to help form a new type of person.
Can do
Now all that can be said quickly and with little thought but when you are up against a force like the Nazis pious words and high minds theories can quickly crumble. Fr Kentenich saw this as the moment when his belief in divine providence would be tested to breaking point but he was also confident that if Mary had led them up to this point and they truly placed everything in the MTA’s hands She would see to it that they succeeded. History tells us that Fr Kentenich survived imprisonment by the secret Police and then several years in Dachau and in spirit his community including sister Xavera followed him step for step in Spirit and in fact. This bred an indomitable ‘can do’ mindset that refused to be bowed or distracted. There was a fierce confidence that the Shrine is Our Lady’s throne of grace and Sr Xavera in coming to Scotland felt that Mary wanted to work the same miracles of grace, whether we liked it or not!!
A piece of the Rhineland in Scotland?
Now it has to be said that here in Scotland we like our Saints long dead and the changes they brought about to be part of the established routine of our faith. St Francis, St Benedict, St Ignatius of Loyola are great characters but what we had in Sr Xavera was a similar spirit living in our own times, and it took some time to get used to her style and force of Spirit.
After a few years she was joined by Sr Vincentas where their day job was to serve the German expatriates who had remained in Britain after the war. This was her bread and butter work carried out at the request of the German bishops who were her employers. However as she went along she also brought her Schoenstatt spirituality to bear and set her sights on establishing a shrine here in Scotland. Now when people heard this many thought Sister was just building another nice little home from home a piece of the Rhineland here in Scotland.
The Shrine had to be wanted by us
What people found hard to get their head around was that the shrine had to be wanted by us. We had to take the initiative and learn what it meant to build the shrine first of all within ourselves. We had to start imitating the first group of boys and invite Mary down and prove our intentions by prayer sacrifice and making ourselves firm free priestly characters. It is a big ask but here in Scotland in our faltering fashioned many have achieved it.
The Holy Mass “towards 2014” will be celebrated in Covenant with Scotland on March 3, 2012.
