One Hundred Years Journey, A View of Schoenstatt

SPAIN, org. “In this jubilee year, it is a look toward Schoenstatt, toward the origin, toward the sources which emerged from the depths of the soul of Father Kentenich, and a question about how to make it alive in us today.”  With these words, Fr. Carlos Padilla, Director of the Schoenstatt Movement in Spain, introduces a reflection, which he also offered schoenstatt.org and that soon will be available as E-Book, so that it may be made known, highlighting the restlessness behind this reflection:  “Reaching one hundred years is an occasion for each one of us to ask himself how is the Schoenstatt which is being experienced?  Perhaps the passing of the years has filled the old dreams and desires with dust.  Is the Schoenstatt we are living young, youthful?  Is it a joyful Schoenstatt that infiltrates all the spheres of our life?”  These are questions in line with Conference 2014 in which he participated and whose message was  five years old on February 7^th.

Here are the key topics, which Father Carlos Padilla outlines in the reflection:

Upon thinking about the one hundred years’ history of the Covenant of Love, the fundamental question emerges:  How is Schoenstatt founded anew when we complete a century of history? We want to found Schoenstatt anew following the motto that accompanied the celebration for the first fifty years of history:  “Faithful to the origin, found anew.”  We want to do it going back to the origin, to the beginning of our Covenant history, to the roots, to what is fundamental, to the simplest and purest form that was germinating from the beginning.  To found anew, respecting the principles, the bases, which were the basis of the first covenant.  Faithful to Father Kentenich, to what God did in him.  Through it, without wanting to take it all in, I am going to mention some perceptions, routes for reflection, open questions, a look at the life which permits us to think on what it means for each one of us that Schoenstatt completes its one hundred years of history.  Pope Francis, when he was Cardinal Bergoglio, said to the Movements:  “How sad when a movement or an institution becomes ill and instead of being shepherds for the community, they become ‘hairdressers for sheep’ and they spend all their time in conferences ‘dressing up their soul!’  Be careful!  Be careful with the elite groups.  The elites close themselves up in the bubble, lose their missionary horizon, lose the motivation, and lose the courage.  Institutions and Movements have to provide the legacy.  You will ask me:  ‘Father, where?’  In the street, in the street.  There where the life of this city is taking place.  As bishop, I ask you:  Please, do not keep the legacy in the china cabinet to show it off to visitors.  Take it to the street, seek missionary horizons, ‘risk it’ daily, may this legacy – which we have received so gratuitously – be the leaven for this city.”  These words of Pope Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio, pronounced sometime ago, have a special power today.  Yes, we want to take our charism out of the china cabinet, we do not want to live being hairdressers to sheep, that is not our mission.  We want to form ourselves so that we may go out and share what we have received.  We want to open the doors and offer to the Church, to the world, that legacy we have received so gratuitously.  We are profoundly grateful for our history, for all the life that has come forth from the source of the Shrine.  We are awed always anew.  God is faithful; Mary is always loyal.  We have received many gifts and blessings and we are happy.  To reach one hundred years is an occasion for each one of us to ask ourselves how is the Schoenstatt we are living?  Perhaps the passing of the years has filled the old dreams and desires with dust.  Is the Schoenstatt we are living young, youthful?  Is it a joyful Schoenstatt that permeates all the spheres of our life?  Do we live the radicalism of the Covenant even to its ultimate consequences?  Are we faithful children to all that Father Kentenich left us as his legacy?  This reflection has helped me return to the origin, to renew myself in my love for Schoenstatt, to not let me remain in the structure and in forms.  Father Kentenich did not want to found an International Movement.  He simply said ‘yes’ to God and Mary, and the rest came in addition; that is how life in God usually is, when we give Him everything and hold back nothing, God gives us the unexpected.

First reflection:  a look at our Father and Founder

Schoenstatt cannot be understood without Father Kentenich. Schoenstatt was born from his heart as Father and prophet; it breaks through in his personal history, it emerges in his soul.  He experienced in his own flesh how Mary was capable of healing and forming a new man from clay.  Not from recipes or from programmed asceticism, but from the life of each one, from personal history, that is how God acts.  That is how He did it with Father Kentenich, and with him, everything started.  God bursts into history and makes use of a favorite instrument, of a man with abilities and defects ­– a man very much of God, in love with Christ, passionate for Mary– a man already wounded from the crib.  The healing power of love ultimately healed him.  But his wound was always a source of life and a road to sanctity– the cause of his pain and motive for hope.  How important our wounds are!  He was the child of a single mother.  His father never embraced him.  Mathias Joseph Koep never acknowledged him as his son and also never married his mother.  Thus Joseph felt rejected from childhood; it is so many peoples’ experience in this life.  On many occasions, there are children with living fathers who never feel loved by them.  Father Kentenich experienced this rejection, abandonment and loneliness.  The years of loneliness in an orphanage marked him forever.  His honor, his reputation, his name… all in doubt.  The loneliness of a very rational man, without attachments, closed within himself, with the heart trapped behind a wall.  Often the heart goes another way and the head wants to understand the reasons.  In him – was very clear – the separation between faith and life, between ideas and the heart, between dreams and the incarnate reality.  A distant God, a brutal God, a God detached from man.  An idea of a God that was not able to penetrate all the fibers of the heart.  Father was able to walk to the brink of the abyss, to the brink of insanity.  He reached the extreme and God stopped him there.  Where does the change begin?  The break and the unity.  The wound and the life that comes forth from the same hurt.  That wound from whence hope comes forth.  The wound that causes so much pain and that sometimes one feels like covering up, hiding it, denying it.  Father Kentenich came to affirm that no one, no human being, had an influence on his own education during his infancy and adolescence.  That is a hard affirmation.  The heart understands how deep the wound in his soul is.  Nobody, only Mary, only the Virgin from that first consecration, had an influence on him.  That is a terrible affirmation, hard, moving.  What inner loneliness!  And he did not fall into desperation, although, as he himself confesses, he was at the point of going insane.  How much like the man of today!  How real his wound!  A man with no roots, who does not see his faith incarnate, embodied, who does not see God in his own life.  A man alone, with his pain, uncommunicative, trapped in his abandonment.  A wounded man and divided within himself.

How and when did his wound begin to heal?  The consecration to Mary of a nine-year old child is the key point. That moment of Katharina’s surrender is the first opening crack.  We owe it to her that Mary would take Joseph’s education seriously.  It is an act that could almost have passed unnoticed, hidden with the passing of the years in his memories.  That is how Schoenstatt began in his own heart.  The first Covenant was pronounced with timidity, filled with fear, almost without knowing it… his own mother, Katharina Kentenich.  She did it with great sadness and in silence, broken by the pain, impotence, at the door of an orphanage.  This humble and brave woman took the first step without knowing it.  She backed down, she stood aside, and let Mary be on the first level.  She, who loved her son so much and who was able to renounce so many things for him, became the first link in a long chain.  Katharina loved Mary and trusted her.  Surely she had already showed the face of Mary to little Joseph and pointed to her as his mother from a very early age.  At that moment, she felt destitute, totally incapable of continuing to care for Joseph daily.  Schoenstatt begins in this way, with the renunciation of a mother whom we seldom remember and thank.  There are so many mothers today who renounce being with their children so they can live in Spain and earn enough money for their future education.  I think about so many immigrant mothers who leave their children in their home countries, because they cannot support them here nor take care of them.  The renunciation generates life, although it may bring along much pain for both parts.  Sometimes we think not, that renunciation is only pain, absence, a loss, and lack of completeness that has no meaning.  In God’s plan, everything falls into place, although on earth it may be difficult to understand his desires.   Renunciation is a source of life in the heart of God, Mary’s renunciation to take care of Jesus, the renunciation of Jesus on the Cross to save mankind.  The renunciation of so many saints throughout the history of the Church.  It is the renunciation done in the heart of God, with humility, in obedience, the one that gives life, the one that is fertile.  The Father receives the life of a mother who is capable of renouncing it for love.  She receives life in that same renunciation.  Katharina renounces herself, her plans, her own path to happiness, of self-realization as a person.  That self-realization which now seems sacred for the whole world.  Today, many people seek themselves, trying to fulfill themselves, of finding the best place to unfold their talents and abilities.  They complain when they do not find their life’s employment, or the house, or the country, when their dreams are not fulfilled and they do not understand that renunciation can be of value.  Nevertheless, Katharina, a woman also wounded and rejected by her son’s father, is capable of renouncing for love, of placing herself on a second level.  She is a strong woman who learns to live in loneliness so that her son may have an education and can make his way.  She surrenders that which she loves most and thus learns to love in silence, in solitude, often at a distance.  She learns to educate on her knees, like so many other mothers when they feel helpless at the hour of educating their children.  We are plunging ourselves into the wound of Father Kentenich’s love.  In that moment, Mary cared for that deep wound.  Katharina also takes care of it by her renunciation, being close by.  Schoenstatt is born from the humility of a renunciation, from the silence of a renunciation, from the oblivion of that woman who gave life to a poor child named Joseph Kentenich.  Schoenstatt begins in the solitude of knowing how to renounce what we love most for love, with meaning.  Schoenstatt begins with a renunciation and with an act of faithful surrender to Mary.  Katharina entrusts her son, Joseph, to Mary.  She seals the first Covenant and Mary accepts that exchange of hearts.  She places in her powerful Mother’s hands the destiny of an abandoned child.  Katharina did not know what she could do, and she trusted in Mary.  She abandons herself.  She places his life in her hands, and she trusts blindly that everything will work out well.  And that is how it is.  When Joseph looks back, he sees in this act of consecration the first Covenant.  He sees in that faithful surrender, the beginning of everything.  There he became a child of Mary forever.  In a not so conscious form.  In a simple and humble form.  But that first Covenant changed his life forever.

At this time in which we celebrate and are grateful, I believe Schoenstatt invites us to be capable of living off-center (decentralized). Katharina’s renunciation makes us ask ourselves if we are capable of renouncing, of placing ourselves on the second level, of being joyful because others can make their way and find their way to happiness, while we remain hidden on a second level.  Mary appears as a model, not only as a way.  She placed herself in second place and accepted the condition of servant, bringing his words to life:  “Let it be done unto me according to your word.”  She withdrew, she let Jesus become flesh in her life and would change forever her path, her destiny, the route of her steps, her own life plans.  It is about being capable of denying ourselves in order to be able to affirm others.  When I think about Schoenstatt, I think that it should always come forth anew in this way.  From the humility of the renunciation.  This maxim is fundamental so that Schoenstatt may be renewed in our heart.  How, if we do not aspire to give life to others?  When we like first place and we seek power, we are not being faithful to this beginning.  When we want to be taken into account and valued for the giving of one’s self, we do not understand how the first Schoenstatt seed was sown.  We can easily fall into the temptation of ranks and positions, of success and efficiency.  Schoenstatt lends itself so that each Schoenstatter feels as founder and believes that everything begins anew with him.  We all run the risk of forgetting Katharina Kentenich.  “Without the winepress, there is no wine,” prayed Father Kentenich.  “If the grain of wheat which falls to the earth does not die, it remains alone,” Jesus tells us.  To deny ourselves only has meaning if it is so that others may have life in abundance.  It is the meaning of all renunciation.  A death to give life.  That there may be more life in others, a true life and complete.  Our way of abundance passes through the way of abundance of those whom we love.  Do we value renunciation?  Do we understand that it can be a source of life and fruitfulness?  What do we renounce for love?

The truth is that on thinking of our Founder, I think of the luck we have.  We have a wounded Founder. He is not perfect.  He does not come from an ideal family, as perhaps some saints and as perhaps we would have wanted.  He did not have a family with a father and mother who loved each other and with perfect children who loved each other.  He was a man without roots, without strong human attachments, with worthy family experiences to be remembered, without brothers and sisters.  He did not have beautiful memories of his infancy, nor photos, nor places filled with fantasy.  There was, indeed, a lot of solitude, hardness, austerity, and poverty.  Father Kentenich had a deep wound of indifference and loneliness, as ours always are.  To the point that it was hard for him to speak of this even at the end of his life.  Even to the point that in Schoenstatt is was a taboo topic.  To that point it was a profound wound, a deep wound, a limiting weakness.  In reality, it made him unfit for what is most evident in a man, which is to be in relationship and to create attachments.  Furthermore, he remained marked by an era in which personal attachments were not seen as good.  A  wound which led him to a lack of inner unity that was so strong and that at some moment he says that he was on the brink of insanity, that division between faith and life, between the Almighty God and the God of his heart, incarnate, who had something to do with him, between the human and the divine, between ideas and life.  If one would think about that moment, before 1912, in searching for the adequate person to found a Movement with the characteristics of Schoenstatt, we would never have chosen Father Kentenich.  In fact, the first voting to accept him into the diaconate was negative because they did not know the interior life of Father Kentenich.  God allowed him to be accepted in the second round of voting.  God chose Father Kentenich so that from him would emerge a Movement which would help and give an answer to many of the wounds he himself had, a Movement of attachments, a home to grow roots.  So many things that he himself lacked and precisely God used him for it.  Why did he stress the wound so much?  Because God uses us with our wound, not in spite of it.  Just as Katharina’s renunciation was a source of life, and our renunciation is a source of life, also our wound can be a source of life as it was in Father Kentenich.  The wound at the open side of Christ is a source of life.  Our own wound, when we accept it and kiss it, God uses it and it is a source of life.  Through this there is a first key for understanding Schoenstatt.  Schoenstatt is called to found itself anew from this reality that seems to me so important.  God does not deny our wound when He wants to give life from our own YES.  He does not build on a soul without sin, except in the case of Mary.  No, God accepts us as we are and is not ashamed of our wound.  On the contrary, He makes use of it.  We often think that God only loves our virtues and takes advantage only of what we do good, those talents he has placed in our soul.  If we sing well, he will use us so that others may fall in love with Him, thanks to our voice.  If we are geniuses in computerization, He will use this very practical talent to evangelize in this way.  But it is hard for us to understand that God would want to use our limitations, our weakness, that wound we want to forget, to give life in abundance to others.

Father Kentenich’s loneliness, which in itself is something terrible, becomes the key to understand how Schoenstatt emerged. God used his loneliness to make him the father of a family.  He used that silence, that depth of his interior life, that garden rich in depth, so that a new charism would germinate there.  He used the clay of his history, to germinate a work of art.  His lack of a father was fundamental for awakening in him the desire to give what he had not received, a profound and authentic paternity (fatherhood).  The wound, the rupture, become a bridge, a way of sanctity.  I think that Schoenstatt is founded anew in us when we assume this truth in us, that without our wound, God cannot give life to others.  Because the wound becomes a portal of entry, so that God may enter and so that others may come near.  Because our wound makes us humble and more merciful and makes us judge the reality from a position of smallness and not from pride.  Enough of formulating  personal ideals which are not ours, but taken from the lives of the saints or created while looking at an ideal which is so far from us that perhaps it will never belong to us.  Ideals, which break us up inside because they continuously remind us of the disproportion between what we desire and what we are.  Let us start from our own wound, from our life just as it is, from our smallness which dreams of heights.  That is how Father Kentenich did it.  Let us understand that from that wound, from the depth of our pain, from that history of which we are so often ashamed, that is from where God begins to carve out the true masterpiece which he wants to make of us.  That wound of which perhaps we might never dare to speak of in public – as would happen to Father Kentenich – is our source of life and our way of salvation.  Let us accept our history, if we are able to love our own flesh, with which God will work wonders.  Let us think that it is possible for God to do impossible things.  He can do everything well, starting with our poverty.  That is how God did it with Mary, from her smallness.  Thus he has always done it again with the saints.  That is how He did it with Father Kentenich.  To live thus will make us more merciful, more human, more humble, more joyful because we will not have to defend ourselves against anyone.  In Schoenstatt, sometimes we value more the talents and we center on the capabilities.  The one who speaks well, the one who has a marvelous life, the one who writes incredibly, the one who gives marvelous testimonies, the one who sings like the angels, the one who is a good group leader, the one who has read many books about Schoenstatt and knows how to expound on them, etc.  We are attracted by perfection; we cannot help it.  Original attractiveness seems that it will be more fruitful, and we spurn the one who does not know as much, the one who is not distinguished, the one who seems to not have so many talents, the one who is clumsy, the one who is very wounded.  In his life, Father Kentenich surrounded himself by wounded persons.  I think that to found anew starts by being open, by building on the lives of those God has entrusted to us, with the free rowers we have, without looking for the non-existent perfection.  It consists in our being happy with the clay, even if it is not perfect, pure and brilliant.  If we do not do it, we will not be faithful to the origin of our sacred history.  We do not look for efficiency; we do not pretend that everything turns out well, to be perfect coordinators of events.  We do not want to be selective, looking only for the elite to lead the masses.  Because that was not the way that Jesus followed in his life.  Jesus surrounded himself by sinners and people who were rejected, wounded, sick.  We dream of having an open and merciful heart like that of Christ.  A heart that looks at man as he is looked at by Jesus, as Mary looks at him, as Father Kentenich looked at him.

Father Kentenich arrives at this Covenant of Love in 1914 with great depth. There is something very beautiful and it is a part of our legacy, in that imperfection of his history, God gave Father Kentenich something that is a treasure, that was the depth of his soul.  Father Kentenich dug into his soul, into his loneliness.  Sometimes we are lacking that.  Upon digging deeply in his soul, in his solitude, in his reticence, in his surrounding wall, he permitted – in his relationship to Mary – that Schoenstatt would emerge.  Schoenstatt emerged in the depth of Father’s heart before seeing the light for men.  Schoenstatt does not come forth from great events or activities.  On the contrary, it is born in the silence of the depth of a soul, in the profundity of a heart.  If Father had remained on the surface, there would not have been sufficient depth for the world of Schoenstatt to come forth.  There are people who believe they belong to Schoenstatt only because they go to events and participate in activities.  But that Schoenstatt that they live is superficial and can quickly disappear when setbacks and deceptions emerge.  There is no depth.  Schoenstatt has not taken root in the depths of the heart.  We are Father’s heirs according to the measure in which there is depth in our soul, according to the measure in which the Covenant of Love has captured all the fibers of our heart.  The world of Schoenstatt germinated in that interior ocean of Father Kentenich, in that interior garden.  It germinated there.  Therefore, he could then take it out, because he already had it.  Because it had already occurred in him and later he added all that he already had lived.  The first Covenant of Love had already happened for him, and he had matured with the passing of time.  In those difficult and hard years of his youth, Schoenstatt germinated in his heart, and the only thing he did later was to find channels for that source that came out of him, which was already in him.  Mary healed Father Kentenich’s indifference and the love that emerged from the healing gave life to many.

His paternity and his maternity. Schoenstatt is born from a paternity.  God acted through his paternity.  Father Kentenich began to take out from within what he never thought he had.  Mary converted Father Kentenich’s life into a source of life for others.  Without having had a father, he learned to be a father and mother at the same time, when God gave him spiritual children.  Thus his wound was healed, giving himself, surrendering himself, dying for others.  It was a very human and close paternity.  If there is something we need in Schoenstatt, it is fathers and mothers, human and close– fathers and mothers who direct us and plunge us into the heart of God.    The boys found that security in Father.  They trusted Father Kentenich, they looked for him, they admired him, and they loved him.  In him they found a place where they could set down roots.  They rooted themselves in him with all the risks that attachments always have– the risk of dependency, deception, exclusiveness, and the risk of becoming an inordinate attachment.  It did not matter.  Schoenstatt emerges from a confidence cultivated on a daily basis through surrender.  Thus he healed his abandonment, being a father.  Thus, in giving a home to others, he found a home.  Suddenly, everything fell into place.  His wound made him experience the tear in man of those lonely and in need of young men. He was capable of placing himself in the place of the other, of understanding, of empathizing and knowing how much need for rootedness there is in man.  He was capable of giving to each one what had saved him:  the face of Mary.  But it was the attachment to his person that led them to Mary– the human bond that God made use of to lead them to the heart of God:  “God wants to attract us with human bonds.  Therefore He secures that we allow ourselves to be attached through childlike love, conjugal, paternal.  He permits us to become attached to children, parents and spouses.  But God casts that bond upwards and does not rest until everything is bound to Him”[1].  Attachments heal us and root us in God.  Although they sometimes frighten us.  Because we fear they may become inordinate.  Who can say that all their connections and attachments are in perfect order!  Only Mary.  The rest of us carry the wound of loneliness in our soul.  And we become attached in order to understand and to love and to always be able to reach for the highest, unto God.  Father’s paternity was also a maternity.  He was father and mother.  Those young boys were in need of a mother.  It was not enough for them to have a father who would listen to them and would show them broad horizons. No, they needed a mother who would be attentive to their most basic daily needs, to what was most essential.  For that reason, we are also called to show the mercy of that paternity and maternity among men.  We are children and fathers and mothers.  That makes us brothers and sisters, truthfully.  It makes us family.  Today there are many orphans with living fathers and mothers.  To found Schoenstatt anew goes through learning to be better children and better fathers and mothers.  It goes through being a home where others can set down roots, with the risk of what it supposes for both parts.  Schoenstatt is that home, where many will set down roots and breathe a supernatural atmosphere.  A space, where there is no concern for the personal needs of each person is not a home, where we are accepted only if we are useful and then forgotten, where we are given more attention when we serve, where we contribute something.  Schoenstatt is a home if we are able to be ourselves, if we can show ourselves precisely as we are outside the Shrine, if we are not rejected and do not live in competition with the others, comparing ourselves continuously.  Schoenstatt is a home when anyone can find his/her place and can feel loved, at home, without fears.  Schoenstatt is a home if there are mothers who embrace and are personally concerned for each one.  Schoenstatt is faithful to its mission if we educate so that there may be fathers who show the way and give security.  Thus and only thus, will we be better brothers and sisters.  Only when we feel as brothers and sisters, do we see ourselves as equal and only seek to be the first, we compete, we want to shine, have power, be the favorites, the chosen, the most loved, the only ones who do things right.  We compete for a place almost without knowing it.  And you cannot build in this way.  If the brothers and sisters do not learn to be children and father and mothers, they will not be able to mature as brothers and sisters.  They will not feel free.  They will not find their place.  They will not have the peace of the one who knows that he gives what he can give and not what he does not have.

-> Continuation:  Second Reflection – a look at the way prepared by God

-> Continuation:  Third Reflection – a look at our way of sanctity

English translation:  Carlos Cantú, Schoenstatt Family Federation, La Feria, Texas USA  04222014