Maria Fischer •
Today, while looking for something completely different, I found a letter written to Father Kentenich more than 20 years ago. A letter on the last page of a Schoenstatt magazine from 2003, which has long since ceased to exist. The author was then part of the editorial team of this magazine (Brücke, German Professional Women’s Branch) and with this letter she wanted to promote something, more than ten years before the jubilee of 2014. —
And as I read the letter, I wonder if it has reached Father Kentenich. To us. Then, or maybe now. It is time to discern. Not looking ahead to 2014, but to what is coming in our time.
I have been turning over my head with the subject of the opening of spirit and the centenary of your founding. And I don’t know what to wish for October 18, 2014.
No, unfortunately it is not open-mindedness that characterizes me, nor the firm trust that God’s hand will send us enough open doors, but, I believe, it is uncertainty.
I wish that October 18, 2014 will not be “just any Jubilee” that is well organized.
I want you to be proud of your Schoenstatt Family and your foundation, which has entered a new millennium without you physically leading it.
I want you to say in heaven (and in our hearts): “This is exactly my Schoenstatt, just as I wanted it for 2014”.
I want you to be able to say with joy: “My dear Schoenstatt Family!”
Sometimes I can imagine that the Jubilee cannot take place in Schoenstatt because the entire Schoenstatt Family is in Rome; not because we want to go on pilgrimage to commemorate Schoenstatt’s centenary, but because the Church invites the entire Schoenstatt Family to Vatican Council III to help shape the Church in a new way…
Sometimes I wish that the Jubilee would take place in a train station in a big city so that we could take the Covenant of Love, as the good news of the third millennium, to the marginalized of our society and that a new and living Church would grow there that would inflame us anew, and that we would only want to celebrate it “in situ”…
I end by returning to the theme of openness of spirit. Dear God, send us open doors that we cannot ignore even when we are busy with our plans.
Speak in each individual heart and in the entire Schoenstatt Family that our hearts may burn and, with confidence, you can place the realization of the Jubilee in our hands.
Hildegard
The design is outdated. The 2014 Jubilee has passed. But the letter touches on something that Schoenstatters in Spain have addressed several times this year.
Original: German 14.2.2024. Translation: Marcela Fernández, Toronto, Canada
