GERMANY, Renate Siebenkäs •
Dear Father Franz Reinisch, with regret I realize today that I have not yet given you anything for your 120th birthday. Today is Valentine’s Day – Saint Valentine liked to give flowers from his garden. You are also a great flower lover, especially the roses have done it to you – with their thorns. So today I give you roses hidden in the Lord’s Prayer! —
Father Franz Reinisch House in the Schoenstatt Center Marienberg, Bamberg
The Martyr of the Month of February – Franz Reinisch
You are looking at me as background from my laptop and in that picture that I bought for 1 € at the Marienberg/Convent store.
A devotee has lovingly framed a photograph of you with a beatification prayer on the back and painted it with stars. There are 13 stars – whether you are the 13th star for Our Lady?
Thus, you are always present, watching me at every desk work. In any case, my thoughts are very often with you. Above all, the great joy that you are the Martyr of the Month of February*.
How did you endure this more than rocky road? The long, inhumanly long time?
And I wonder how often you prayed the Lord’s Prayer. Was it one of your prayers of strength?
Our Father
God is a God with whom I can be on a first-name basis. A God of boundless love, who wants to be close to me, as close as a father can be – ABBA!
In Heaven
When you have climbed the peaks of the mountains of your homeland, so high up, so close to heaven, you have surely felt that not only the blue or cloudy sky stretches over the earth, but that an infinite creative power is hidden behind it.
Hallowed be thy Name
In great reverence, with exceeding love, you have sanctified the name of our Father. You followed his calling in a roundabout way so that as many people as possible would sanctify his name.
Soon you realized that on the political level of National Socialism the holy name of God was trampled underfoot.
Your kingdom come
Your faith was as immovable as the mountains of your homeland. You did everything to achieve this goal on earth for yourself and your sheep entrusted to you.
With horror you quickly found out that all levers were set in motion to fix all people on the 1000-year kingdom, there God’s kingdom had not the slightest place.
Thy will be done
How many times have you thought and meditated on these three words? How many days and nights have you wanted to clarify for yourself whether your decision to refuse the oath to Hitler is your personal decision or whether it has been placed in your heart by God? YOUR WILL BE DONE – no matter what the consequences? On your own – as the only German priest?
As in heaven – so on earth
In heaven God’s will reigns!
As a pastor, you wanted to make your faithful understand this as the elixir of life. And you noticed with horror, however, that God’s will should play no more role on the level of politics and spread more and more.
Give us today our daily bread
I can only guess how often they may have “overlooked” you at the food distribution, you had to starve. That the meager food consisted of a water soup. Hunger was your daily companion.
You were even more consumed by the longing for the daily bread that Jesus promised us, that he gave to his disciples and to all Christians at the Last Supper – himself, his body, and his blood.
How overjoyed you were when you were able to receive the Lord, to become His monstrance – to give Him shelter for worship in secret with you.
And forgive us our trespasses
How much you suffered from your own faults. Again and again, they caught up with you. Consistently, with Our Lady in a double pack, You managed to get rid of them.
As we forgive those who trespass against us
I am not such a thorough connoisseur of your writings. But I imagine only too vividly that you had been ready to forgive every guilty person. You saw yourself just at the end of your life as a torch, a flame of love of Our Lady, who wants to burn the hatred in all the world.
And lead us not into temptation
This is a very difficult sentence from the Lord’s Prayer:
How many times were you tempted by persons – by Pallottine Fathers, by Sergeant Hauer, by all kinds of people who saw your life (and also theirs because of the clannishness) in danger, to lead you away from your way.
Those were probably the most difficult moments in your imprisonment. And I ask myself – how did you bear such difficult situations? Didn’t you go crazy for yourself and for your dear fellow men?
Your parents, Father Joseph Kentenich and ultimately the greatest help came from Our Lady in the Original Shrine. When you spiritually placed yourself with HER in the Original Shrine, you grew beyond yourself. You received the heavenly power, the assistance of the Holy Spirit. The MTA and the Holy Spirit are one.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.
This appendix was not yet prayed in your time. But in it there is also the resolution of the question of Your superhuman power – to sacrifice Yourself as a torch of love, to have death permanently before Your eyes and to know that the oath saves my life. Unimaginable.
Our greatest wish is your beatification! For this we pray daily, unceasingly!
Barn with birthday candles
“Barn with birthday candles” – Marienberg, Bamberg
That’s how I titled this picture.
And symbolically there is still a lot of material for love torches under the foil.
This is now our task, in this time critical of the Church, to burn for the Gospel of love, to take the Good News literally.
Dear Father Franz Reinisch, how precious is your legacy! How happy the Schoenstatt Family on Marienberg can call itself to find so many traces of you on the spot and in the hearts of people who have intensively studied you and your life. It is still valid: Stand for what you believe.
GO ON MISSION – EVERY DAY!
The greatest gift is the Covenant of Love with you – and our Mother Mary is not jealous!
The personal picture of Franz Reinisch with thirteen stars
Martyr of the Month February 2023
* The “Stephanus-Stiftung” for persecuted Christians has published a short text about Franz Reinisch under the title: Martyr of the Month February 2023, in German
Cover photo: Wikipedia
Original: German. Translation: Maria Fischer @schoenstatt.org
