It means to spread this Covenant of Love, this Covenant Culture

BRAZIL, Sr. M. Nilza. In an interview for 2014, Fr. Alexandre Awi, the National Director for the Schoenstatt Apostolic Movement, speaks about the Year of Grace, the centenary of the Covenant of Love: “Schoenstatt is a movement that was born to be apostolic. It was created to be missionary. It is, therefore, a Movement that goes out onto the streets; a child of war, that goes into the battlefield, goes out into that which the Holy Father has repeatedly described as ‘existential peripheries’. In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelium Gaudium, he again speaks and reiterates that “if whole Church takes up this missionary impulse, she has to go forth to everyone without exception.”

Fr. Alexandre, we are now inthe jubilee year of the Covenant of Love and we often hear: make the most of this jubilee year because it is a special year of grace and of the Covenant of Love. How should we live this year?

Fr. Alexandre: I believe that living the jubilee year is to make the most of what it means to live in Covenant. We are celebrating 100 years of the Covenant of Love, this is our great charism. The invitation of the Schoenstatt Family this year is to intensify the way in which we live the Covenant.

The more we take advantage of this year to live as if it were the most important year, the more the Covenant of Love will truly become a larger part of our lives. This means doing the things that we are already doing, but doing them even better and perhaps taking on some new initiatives to spread this Covenant of Love, this Covenant Culture.

This is why I believe that the invitation we have received is a call to make more contributions to the Capital of Grace, to trust more in the Blessed Mother’s actions from the Shrine, visit more Schoenstatt Shrines, allow ourselves to be transformed by this power of self-education and the Capital of Grace, intensify our apostolate, deepen our attachments, live our Covenant Culture ever more deeply.

If this is something that we should normally be doing as Schoenstatt members, then there is even more reason for us to do so this year. The grace of finding even more fertile ground through our selfless service and our effort to make the most of the opportunity that this jubilee year gives us.

I believe that this is a year to intensify what we are already doing but also to take on new initiatives to spread our charism which is the Covenant of Love with Mary, that is, a covenant culture.

As National Director, what advice can you give us so that we can really live the jubilee celebrations in parishes amd dioceses, so that these can become Covenant blessings on 18 October?

Fr. Alexandre: Well, first of all, we should not wait for 18 October to start thinking about this. The whole year should be a year of preparation for 18 October. Therefore, we started the jubilee (18 October 2013) so well with the triduum which took place in thousands of parishes across Brazil. The whole Church has already felt the atmosphere of the jubilee of the Covenant of Love.

The indulgences given by Pope Francis for Schoenstatt’s daughter shrines — there are 22 in Brazil — is also a special way of living out this year. Who knows, perhaps use this year to make a special pilgrimage to the daughter shrines. Organize pilgrimages to receive these indulgences and experience the place of origin, the place of grace which is the shrine.

We also have a novena which is being distributed throughout Brazil. A novena that can be prayed in the nine months prior to 18 October. We want to start it on 18 January so that every parish, all the family groups that receive the Pilgrim Mother and all the Mother and Queen Men’s Rosary groups can take advantage of this jubilee year to pray this nine-month novena. It is a thin book which can easily be bought at our shrines or through the Pilgrim Mother Campaign so that many can join in this grace and celebrate this jubilee together.

Another important matter is to book a special place to celebrate 18 October. In some places the parish will not be big enough and a larger space may be required, perhaps the diocesan cathedral. Now is also the time to invite your bishops so that they can celebrate this feast with us. We cannot wait for the bishop’s diary to be full to invite him. We have to do this now, so that the jubilee does not take us by surprise, beginning the preparations for this great feast that we will celebrate together in many dioceses and parishes throughout the world on 18 October 2014.

During the preparations for the jubilee year we often heard the expression: “Faithful to the origin.” However, we find ourselves living in a world filled with new ideas, a world that never stops. What is the relationship between faithfulness to the origin and creativity as a response to our times?

Fr. Alexandre: Right after the death of our father and founder, Father Josef Kentenich, Fr. Alex Menningen who was his faithful follower and trusted by the entire Schoenstatt Family coined an expression that deals with precisely this question — “creative faithfulness.” While we should be faithful to our origin, faithful to our history, our father and founder always said that we should immerse ourselves in our history, immerse ourselves in the source so that we can live in our times. This faithfulness must also be faithful to the times in which this Covenant and this charism is lived, so that we do not falsify the original intention.

“Creator” is therefore an expression of our desire and our duty to respond to the needs and realities of the human person today.

Since the last national conference, the Pilgrim Mother Campaign, inspired by João Luiz Pozzobon, has spoken about understanding the Covenant of Love from the origin or living the Covenant of Love by understanding the origin. I think that João Pozzobon did this. He lived the Covenant of Love fully by understanding its origin and remaining faithful to that origin: faithful to the Capital of Grace, faithful to the shrine, faithful to self-education, looking to truly live the mystery of Schoenstatt in its fullness.

But to do this, we cannot be stuck in the past and we must live in today’s world, in present circumstances. We should live it in our parish, in our family, in our community, with the same ardor, with the same awareness of the Schoenstatt mystery, but in today’s circumstances. I think this is our great challenge: to be creative so that the message of Schoenstatt may always continue to be original, and it must always be strengthened in the contemporary for the person and the world of today.

The theme for the last three years of preparation for the jubilee is: “Your Covenant, our Mission.” During last year’s October Conference you emphasized that “Your Covenant” refers to the Blessed Mother, but it also refers to our father and founder, Fr. Joseph Kentenich. It refers to the Covenant of Love that he sealed with the Blessed Mother on 18 October 1914. How can I make the founder’s Covenant my Covenant?

Fr. Alexandre: Of course, Schoenstatt’s charism emerges from its founder and his experiences of the Blessed Mother in his life, in the shrine, in his history. So if I want to live my Covenant of Love fully with the Blessed Mother, we should really be looking at our founder and asking for the grace to live this covenant in the same spirit he did.

At the October Conference we said that throughout Schoenstatt’s history, Fr. Kentenich had a certain way of reacting to things that also marked our history, especially the milestones: divine light, divine confidence, divine power and divine victory. I believe that in this jubilee year we can also ask for the grace to live the Covenant of Love under the same light, confidence, strength and certain of victory, as our father and founder did throughout his life.

Perhaps this could also be a year for us to pray directly to our founder more often, asking for the grace to live as he lived. And, who knows, perhaps for some people, this could be an opportunity to seal a filial covenant with him, something which is part of the history and tradition of our Schoenstatt Family. We can therefore pray to live this jubilee year with same ardor and the same characteristics which he lived his Covenant throughout his life.

For me, the attachment to our father and founder can never be forced. It must happen through grace. The jubilee year could be a wonderful opportunity to pray for this grace and to increase our attachment to our father and founder. After all, “Your Covenant”: our father and founder’s covenant – his Covenant with the Blessed Mother and the Blessed Mother’s Covenant with him – this is our mission!

Fr. Kentenich lived the Covenant of Love with the Blessed Mother. Isn’t it enough to live the Covenant of Love with the Blessed Mother? Why this special attachment to the founder?

Fr. Alexandre: Every founder is the bearer of a charism, and together with the charism, he has the same mission for the world of today. Without doubt, an attachment with the founder also forms part of Schoenstatt’s charism. Schoenstatt is a pedagogical movement that values human bonds and God’s actions through human transparencies.

God does not only want to come directly to us. He can reach us directly. But often, especially in our Catholic tradition and piety, we drew closer to God through human beings. This is why we place so much value on Mary, who was fully human and is also the closest intercessor between God and man.

In the same way, the attachment to our father and found is part of our charism because in him we see clearly see God’s actions. We experience God who wants us to come to him through his human transparency, through secondary causes, in the language of scholastic theology, the theology that St. Thomas developed so clearly in the West.

We, therefore, truly want to approach God through Fr. Kentenich. Not only Fr. Kentenich, but all those who play parental roles in our lives, because this is God’s way of approaching us. By increasing our attachment with our father and founder, we are also better able to understand and live out the charism that he left us. This is because we believe that our founder’s mission is Mary’s mission, and the mission of every Schoenstatt member is our founder’s mission, the mission that he received and transmitted charismatically to his entire Schoenstatt Family.

You experienced Pope Francis very closely and worked with him. What does Schoenstatt’s jubilee year and our spirituality have to offer the Church during this papacy?

Fr. Alexandre: Pope Francis has emphasized some ideas that parallel Schoenstatt’s spirituality. During the October Conference I had the opportunity to talk about two of these: the idea of a covenant culture and the idea of mission.

“Schoenstatt is a movement that was born to be apostolic, it was created to be missionary. It is, therefore, a Movement that goes out onto the streets; a child of war, that goes into the battlefield, goes out to what the Holy Father has insisted is the ‘existential peripheries’. In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelium Gaudium, he again speaks and reiterates that “if whole Church takes up this missionary impulse, she has to go forth to everyone without exception.”

Schoenstatt does this! And it does this, particularly, through our covenant culture, which is another way of expressing what Pope Francis describes as “the culture of encounter.” A culture, an environment that is marked by fraternal bonds, bonds of love whereby people open up to one another, cultivate proximity. Similarly, Schoenstatt has cultivated a covenant not only with the Blessed Mother, but a covenant that projects itself through fraternal ties, solidarity, love, encounter – both in relation to one another, in relation to nature, in relation to the world and society.

So, by living the culture of the covenant of love fully, with a missionary spirit, an apostolic spirit, we are living — through our charism — that which Pope Francis asks of the entire Church in these times.

Thank you very much, Fr. Alexandre for sharing this message with the Schoenstatt Family in Brazil. May the Blessed Mother always bless your mission as a priest, your personal mission and your enormous task as the National Director for the Schoenstatt Movement in Brazil.

Fr. Alexandre: Thank you very much. I also send special greetings to each Schoenstatt member spread throughout Brazil and I wish you all a very blessed jubilee year, an ever deep encounter with the Blessed Mother, her shrine and a renewal of the power of our origins, the power of the Covenant of Love.

Original: Portuguese – Translation: Sarah-Leah Pimentel, South Africa

Audio

Source: www.maeperegrina.org.br