Holy Week Pilgrimage Through Schoenstatt’s Holy Places

Sarah-Leah Pimentel. In this Jubilee Year, we offer a Reflection-Pilgrimage for Holy week, starting Palm Sunday and ending Easter Sunday.  It focuses on all the places (geographic and our holy places) of Schoenstatt history: Original Shrine, Cambrai, Dachau, Bellavista, Milwaukee, Founder chapel, heroes’ graves and Adoration Church.

Palm Sunday – Original Shrine

Today’s celebration is bittersweet.  On the one hand, we’re celebrating our king as he arrives in Jerusalem riding a donkey, singing our Hosannas and waving palm branches.  The city is alive with activity because the people of Israel have come on pilgrimage from all over to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, that feast where they recall how God once delivered them from slavery in Egypt.  On the other, the Gospel reminds us of the reason that Jesus has come to Jerusalem — he has come here to suffer for our sake, to die a cruel death on the Cross, he is the final Passover sacrifice, the one who delivers us from the slavery of sin.  Our joy anticipates the sorrow that is to come.

This year, we are also on pilgrimage.  We’re on pilgrimage (spiritually and physically) to the Original Shrine – our special, little Jerusalem – and we come to celebrate 100 years of the covenant of love.  We joyfully bring our gifts to the Capital of Grace in thanksgiving for the many blessings our Family has received over the last century.   We praise our Blessed Mother, Queen and Victress of Schoenstatt, for having set up her home in this shrine and every daughter shrine where we have come to know her.  We thank her for the many times she drew us to the heart of her Son, depicted in this special place of grace as the Child who looks at us with such yearning, inviting us into a deeper relationship with Him.

But our pilgrimage is incomplete if we recall only the joyful moments.  This shrine, this place of origin, is the source of our joy, yes, but this joy was paid for at a high price.  This shrine also bears the scars of suffering, the many times it tasted the bitterness of the Cross.  Tears were shed in this shrine when Joseph Engling and his fellow sodalists fell in battle on the fields of Cambrai in France.  This shrine was the site of decisions that required more than human courage — Fr. Kentenich’s resolve to expose the dehumanization of the Nazi regime, his decision from the prison in Koblenz to accept certain death in Dachau for the strengthening of the Family.  We recall the many Sisters who spent hours on their knees in this Shrine praying for Fr. Kentenich to survive the horrors of the concentration camp, and later, during his exile, that he would one day be allowed to come home, to his beloved Schoenstatt land and receive his due recognition as the father and founder of this new apostolic movement, this new spiritual way within the Church.  Over the years, thousands of people have to this shrine, looking for the answers to the difficult questions in their lives.  And we have experienced time and time again that in this shrine the words of the Memorare are true: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided.”

Just like Good Friday follows Palm Sunday, so the history of the Original Shrine is filled with both joy and hardship.  But because we live in the hope of the Resurrection, we know that the joys and the sufferings are all part of God’s perfect plan of love.

And so, today, we give thanks for these experiences.  As we prepare to renew our covenant of love and found Schoenstatt for the next 100 years, we ask for the joy to celebrate all the Hosanna moments, but also for the fortitude and unshakeable faith to withstand the trials that will come, that in each moment we will live our Covenant of Love by walking in the footsteps of our father and founder, Fr. Kentenich.

Monday 14 April – Cambrai

The words of today’s first reading describe Joseph Engling and the other hero sodalists, who freely gave their lives on the battle fields of France during WWI, offering up their youth, dreams, ideals and a future so that all Schoenstatt men and women who would come on after them could have a firm foundation on which to model their lives in the covenant of love:

“I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand.  I will keep you and I will make you to be a covenant for the people, and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” (Is. 42.6-7)

Let us not remember too lightly or too romantically Joseph Engling’s decision to give his life for the covenant of love.  Picture the young man, barely out of his teens, sitting in a rare moment of prayerful tranquillity along the banks of the River Lys.  It is 31 May 1918.  Surrounded by the stench of the trenches, the air thick with gunpowder, the constant smell of death and fear, exploding landmines and shrapnel, the very ground torn and bleeding from the falling bombs.  In this fleeting moment of peace, young Joseph opens his diary and writes the words of complete selflessness, complete surrender to God, showing the complete seriousness in which he wanted to live his covenant commitment:

Dear Mother, Mother Thrice Admirable, I give myself to you renewed as your sacrifice. I offer you everything I am and have, my body and my soul with all its capabilities, everything I own, my freedom, my will.  I “want to belong entirely to you. I am yours. Use me and whatever is mine entirely as pleases you. But if it can be reconciled with your plans, let me be a sacrifice for the aims which you have assigned to our sodality. In humility, your unworthy servant.

On 4 October that year, God honoured his request.  Just five weeks from the end of the war, he was killed by a stray grenade.  Despite numerous expeditions to the battlefields of Cambrai over the years, we have never been able to find Joseph’s remains, to bring him home and bury him in Schoenstatt, behind the Original Shrine, together with the other hero sodalists who fell in that senseless war.  But his 31 May consecration, known today as the Joseph Engling Consecration — has become for many a source of strength in dark and hopeless times.  When there is no way out, no sense to the circumstances of our lives, Joseph Engling stands as a beacon of hope that says: even though I die, my life still has meaning! I give all that I have and am for the glory of God! I give everything, including my life so that the Family may be fruitful, so that life in the covenant of love can bear abundant fruit!

Joseph Engling shows for us in a very human way that Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross is the way that we are all called to follow, trusting fully in the power of the Resurrection, believing that one day the strife will pass.  One day there will be peace.  One day there will be unity.

Today, in Cambrai stands a Schoenstatt shrine, known as the Shrine of Unity – a symbol of peace among the nations, a living sign that we can always be reconciled. Reconciled to God, reconciled to ourselves, reconciled to our brothers and sisters who have hurt us or whom we have hurt, reconciled to our world which craves peace but often doesn’t know how to achieve it.  Let us pray for peace in the world today, and all those who are the victims of war in Syria, in the Central African Republic, in Egypt, in Somalia, the Middle East, the tensions in Ukraine, and so many other places.

Tuesday 15 April – Dachau

Just 21 years later, the world was back at war.  This time a ruthless despot was trying to lay claim to the whole of Europe.  Hitler’s rise to power took on alarming proportions when he organized gangs of secret police to lay fear in the hearts of all who would oppose him.  People were made to swear an oath of allegiance to him. First, the Jewish people became the scapegoat on which he blamed all of Germany’s ills, but soon, in his paranoia, he was rounding up priests, scholars, homosexuals, anyone who opposed him and his policies.

Including Fr. Kentenich.  Already in the early 1930s when the world was only beginning to learn who Hitler was, Fr. Kentenich recognized that his radical national socialism was a tool for mass mindedness, driving people away from following their conscience, making them all prisoners of fear.  In such an environment, it is almost impossible to be a free thinker, to make decisions freely.  Not only did Fr. Kentenich refuse to be manipulated by Nazi ideology, he openly spoke out against it.  In the words of today’s first reading: “He made my mouth like a sharpened sword.” (Is. 49.2)

Fr. Kentenich’s outspokenness got him into trouble.  On 20 September 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned down the road from Schoenstatt, in Koblenz.  As a form of torture, he was kept in solitary confinement for four weeks in a small confined space that had once been a bank vault.  The Gestapo were hoping to break his spirit.  Later he was transferred to a cell in the Koblenz prison while the authorities decided whether to send him to the Dachau concentration camp.

Even though, he was offered a window of opportunity to declare that he was too sickly for camp life, Fr. Kentenich turned down the lifeline that he had been given and willingly chose to go to the concentration camp – which would have meant sure death.  Just as we hear in the Passion Gospel where Jesus tells Pilate that “you would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above,” (Jn 19.11) so too Fr. Kentenich recognized that his life was not in the hands of these men, but in God’s hands and he knew that in God’s hands he was always safe, no matter what could befall him.

And from this great tragedy, God worked his miracles.  Not only did Fr. Kentenich survive Dachau but two branches of the Schoenstatt Family were founded in this place where it seemed that only death could thrive — the Schoenstatt Brothers of Mary and the Family Work (which today includes the Family League, Family Union and Family Institute).  This was also the place where Schoenstatt truly became international and where Fr. Kentenich wrote that text which is so dear to us in Schoenstatt, Heavenwards.

It is perhaps fitting for us, today, to reflect on just a small text from Heavenwards as we walk on our pilgrim way to the Cross and the Resurrection and then onto the great international jubilee celebration of all Schoenstatt’s children:

“Rule over us as pleases God and make us the salt and leaven of the world.  Let us become one heart and one soul as Our Lord implored during his earthly life and despite each individual way remain united, dedicating ourselves to the Father as an ideal kingdom and overcoming the barriers of nationality even when hatred infests the masses of the nations.” (Prayer of the International)

Wednesday, 16 April – Bellavista

Nestled in a cool, green oasis in what is a dry and arid land, lies the Bellavista Shrine in Santiago, Chile.  Its Spanish name means “a beautiful view.”  This was one of the many places in South America that Fr. Kentenich visited after he returned home from WWII.  Here in Bellavista, as in many other places in South America, the Sisters of Mary had the initiative to build replica shrines, as a way for the Schoenstatt families that were growing up around them to experience the graces of the shrine and to invite the Blessed Mother’s presence in these far flung places.  And truly, it has been a real source of life for Schoenstatt, not only in its missionary zeal throughout South America, but the graces flowing from that Shrine have reached us to.  The Unity Cross in our shrines was the fruit borne of great suffering by the Schoenstatt Family gathered around Bellavista.

But we are jumping too far ahead of ourselves.  In 1949, already the next battle that Schoenstatt would face was looming darkly in the background.  The Church authorities were beginning to scrutinize the Schoenstatt work and because it departed so dramatically from the way we experienced Church in the pre-Vatican II era, they were suspicious about its aims and intentions.  In response, Fr. Kentenich wrote a 200-page response, in which he highlighted what he saw as the single greatest threat facing the Church and the modern world: “mechanistic thinking” which prevents the individual from developing holistically in an “organic thinking, loving and living.”

On 31 May 1949, Fr. Kentenich placed this document on the altar at Bellavista in the presence of 20 Sisters of Mary, putting its contents and the consequences thereof into the Blessed Mother’s hands.  He knew that his frank response to the Church’s needs in our time could put Schoenstatt’s entire future in jeopardy — these ideas, which to us today seem quite reasonable, were just too bold for those years.  In his address to the Sisters, he anticipated that another death-leap of faith would soon follow:

“This could be the profound meaning of today’s celebration.  It is simultaneously a joy-bringing gift and a burdensome task (…) we may not be surprised if it calls into action a strong and united front of influential men to oppose me and the Family.  Finally, in human terms we must take into account that the attempt could fail completely.  Nevertheless we may not consider ourselves dispensed from daring to take this step.  Whoever has been given a mission must carry it out, even if it leads into the deepest and darkest abyss, even if it requires one death leap after another.  A prophet’s mission always includes a prophet’s fate.”  (Kentenich Reader I, 248-252)

Just a few days ago our Holy Father recently spoke about this “prophet’s fate.”  It is not clear who he was speaking about during his Homily at Santa Marta on 5 April, but these words also ring true when we speak about Fr. Kentenich:

“So many Church thinkers were persecuted. I am thinking of one, now, not far from us, a man of goodwill, a true prophet, who with his books reproached the Church for distancing itself from God’s way.  He was called to order, his books were placed in the index, they took away his chair and for this man, life ended (…) Time passed and today he has been beatified! How is it that he was a heretic yesterday and today he is beatified?  Because yesterday those who held power wanted to silence him, because they did not like what he said.  Today the Church, which thanks to God knows how to repent, says: “No, this is a good man!” And what is more, he is on the path of sanctity: he has been beatified. Everyone whom the Holy Spirit calls to tell the truth to the people of God suffer persecution.”

The only difference is that Fr. Kentenich has not yet been beatified.  As we unite our Lenten sufferings and persecutions to Christ’s in these last few days of our Lenten journey, we pray for our father and founder’s beatification:

God, Eternal Father, in difficult times you have always sent people to your Church who have shown your people the way to you through their words and example. For the Church in our days you endowed your priest, Fr. Joseph Kentenich, with a great mission.  We ask you, grant that Fr. Kentenich may soon be raised to the honours of the altar, so that his example may be seen by all God’s people, his message be heard everywhere, and his powerful intercession experienced by many. Through his intercession, grant our petitions to the praise of Schoenstatt’s Mother of Grace and your greater glory, all kind and merciful God and Father.  Amen.

Holy Thursday – Milwaukee

Today’s readings set the scene for the Milwaukee years: “The word of the Lord came to me: Son of man, you are living among a rebellious people.  They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious people.  Therefore, son of man, pack your belongings for exile and in the daytime, as they watch, set out and go from where you are to another place.  Perhaps they will understand, though they are a rebellious house.” (Ez. 12.1-3)

In 1951, the Holy Office in Rome decided to remove Fr. Kentenich from all positions of authority and send him indefinitely to the United States, while they carried out a detailed examination of Schoenstatt’s spirituality.  In particular, they were worried about the nature of Fr. Kentenich’s relationship to the various parts of the Movement and ordered that he have no contact with the Movement.  This physical and emotional separation, which lasted from 1951 to 1965, has become known as the “exile years.”

Let us put ourselves into Fr. Kentenich’s shoes for a moment.  In 1951, he wasn’t a young man anymore, he was a man in his mid-60s.  At this age, we are far less adaptable than when we were young.  Distances seemed far greater than they are today.  Today our corporations send us to the far-flung corners of the earth, but the technology that is available to us prevents us from feeling the complete isolation of living in a place where they don’t speak our language or share our culture.  These are luxuries that were not available in Fr. Kentenich’s time.  His reassignment to Milwaukee, to all intents and purposes, is a little bit like being forced to retire to an old age home in a foreign land when you still have the energy to continue a normal life.

This is exactly what Fr. Kentenich did.  He carried on as normal, staying true to the vision that our MTA had planted in his soul from his earliest years. As chaplain to the German-speaking community in Wisconsin, he preached the same message so that the spirit of Schoenstatt emerged even if he couldn’t speak its name.  He wrote prolifically.  The Family Work really took shape among the German-speaking families who might not have known who he was, but had the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  Distant from the Original Shrine, without any hope of ever returning, the understanding of shrine extended to the idea that our homes and hearts can also be living shrines, where the Blessed Mother and her Beloved Son make their home.

On this Holy Thursday, we think especially of our priests, who enact Christ’s call to servant leadership through the un-honourable job of the washing of the feet.  The Milwaukee years can be seen as a 14-year long Holy Thursday, beginning with him being stripped by the Church authorities of his place as the father of a large, international family whom he loved very dearly and who loved him dearly in return.  The anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane is included here as well.  Jesus called his disciples to stay awake and pray with him, but they fell asleep.  Here we can thank the Schoenstatt Sisters and many others, who kept a long 14-year vigil, praying that father could return home.  I am certain that in what Fr. Kentenich often described as the “interweaving of destinies,” these prayers helped him to maintain his resolve even if his soul may have been “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mk. 14:34).

In the Gethsemane of our lives, when sorrow, isolation and loneliness threaten to overwhelm us, we look to Fr. Kentenich’s faith and trust in God’s Providence, so that we can repeat the words of Jesus with confidence: “Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Good Friday — Heroes’ Graves

On this Good Friday, in the same way as we are invited to look to the Cross, the origin of our hope and our salvation, so too we return to the place of our origin – a small shrine hidden in a valley in Vallendar, in which lies the source of our Schoenstatt life.  But instead of going inside the shrine, we are called to take a short walk around the corner to the Heroes’ Graves and honour those who came before us, showing us the way.

In this place, four of our early heroes are buried — Max Brunner and Hans Wormer — two of the founding sodalists who, like Joseph Engling, fell during WWI.  It is also the final resting place for Albert Eise and Franz Reinish.

Fr. Albert Eise was part of the founding generation.  God permitted him to survive the horrors of WWI and he returned to Germany where he was ordained a priest and became one of Fr. Kentenich’s collaborators in building up the Schoenstatt work.  During WWII, he was sent to Dachau together with Fr. Kentenich where he continued to risk his life to ensure that our founder’s texts reached the outside world.  While Fr. Kentenich busied himself with the duties of camp life, Fr. Eise would write what he dictated, including the text of Heavenwards, and then risked this life to smuggle these texts out of the camp.  He eventually succumbed to an outbreak of typhus in the camp and died in 1946.

Fr. Franz Reinisch can be seen as a hero of conscience.  He refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler and was executed for this on 21 August, 1942 and became the only Catholic priest to be executed during Hitler’s reign.  He was inspired by the way in which the first sodalists sacrificed their lives for Schoenstatt and when circumstances forced him to make a decision, he knew that, like Joseph Engling, he was being called to offer up his life for the covenant of love.  He knew that by standing up to Hitler, he was potentially placing the whole Movement at risk, but the call to be a martyr of conscience was far greater, and it has borne great fruit.  The process for his beatification is currently underway in Rome.

These brave men faced the Cross in that moment where they gave their final ‘Fiat.’  They displayed their complete faith that the Cross is not a symbol of final death, but rather the sign of redemption, the sign of hope, the sign of salvation, where all things are purified and made new by the blood of Christ.  We too face the Cross whenever we are carried along by events that are not of our doing, when we suffer persecution for assisting those who do God’s work, when we too, are faced by a crisis of conscience and know that we can only be at peace if we choose the hardest way.

As we gaze solemnly upon the Cross today, let us not be sorrowful or despair at what is to come.  Rather, let us join our hero sodalists in their ardent zeal to live our covenant of love, no matter the circumstances.  We join in the hymn that is so popular among the Schoenstatt youth, particularly in South America, as we reflect on the words of the Franz Reinisch hymn:

Oh Sign so great and wondrous, oh Sunclad sign above, transfigured, penetrated, with God’s all Holy love.  I know but one desire, to burn with love divine, enkindled by you, Mother in Schoenstatt’s Holy shrine.

You stand as Queen of martyrs beneath the cross so still, consenting by your fiat, because it is God’s will. I hear the Father calling, for heroes strong and true.  Please offer me dear Mother, as loving victim too.

Oh Queen of Earth and Heaven command the storms to cease. Destroy the devils power.

Oh Victress grant us peace. Make me your own Apostle, your knight I ask and pray. My dying smile shall whisper, oh dearest M-T-A.

Holy Saturday – Founder Chapel

Today, the world is silent.  Christ’s lifeless body lies in the tomb.  The glory of His resurrection has not yet been revealed.  We too, are silent, as we wait for the moment when Jesus forever breaks the chains of death.

In this silence we are called into the Founder Chapel.  The visitor always approaches quietly.  The corridor leading to Fr. Kentenich’s final resting place is dark, lit only by a small overhead light.  The stone walls of the Adoration Church are cold, even on the warmest summer’s day.  The image of Fr. Kentenich with open arms that welcomes us into the Founder Chapel calls us to an inner silence before we enter this holy place.

Opening the door of the Founder Chapel, our first sight tomb of Fr. Kentenich immediately makes us hold our breath for a few short seconds.  Our minds tell us that in this room is the lifeless body of one gave his entire, long life to the service of Schoenstatt.  But yet, as we enter this room, his presence is also so tangible.  He is there, waiting for us.  This is where he has always been waiting for us, from the moment when he drew his last breath in this sacristy after celebrating his first and only Mass in the Adoration Chapel on 15 September 1968.  This is the place where he calls us to visit him.  This is where, from heaven, he continues to form hearts that are inwardly free for the service of our MTA, our covenant of love with her and our Schoenstatt brothers and sisters, and the Church.

This is a place of silence, a place of silent contemplation, a place of only eight words: Dilexit Ecclesiam.  Heimwärts zum Vater geht unser Weg.  (He loved the Church. Our way leads home to the Father).

As we wait in this cold room for the glory of resurrection, we sit with Christ at his tomb and we reflect on our own Christian mission.  Do we love the Church to which we were called by grace of our baptism? Is our daily journey a constant and steadfast pilgrimage towards our heavenly and eternal home? Is it filled by our heartfelt desire to one day be united to our Heavenly Father?  United to our entire Schoenstatt Family who has gone before us, shining a light unto our path, showing how to live our lives in covenant.

Let my hand reach out as I kneel before Fr. Kentenich’s tomb.  I feel the stone cold slab of concrete in which he lies for all time.  But in that place beyond words, in that realm of silent prayer, I feel the warmth of his soul, my father and founder.  Only eight words form my prayer today.  Dilexit Ecclesiam.  Heimwärts zum Vater geht unser Weg.

Easter Sunday – Adoration Church

Let the Alleluias ring out! Christ is Risen! Ring the bells! We have seen the glory of the Lord.  Today we see the Risen Christ and for a moment touch eternal life.  We give thanks to God for His Great Love.  We praise Him for giving us Eternal Joy.  Alleluia! Gloria in Excelsis!

On any given Sunday morning, the bells of the Adoration Church can be heard ringing on Mount Schoenstatt and down in the valley.  Their joyful ringing are a call to come and celebrate the Eucharist in spiritual communion with Schoenstatt people everywhere around the world.  It is a call to celebrate the Resurrection that becomes real every time we receive the living Christ in Holy Communion.  It is a call to celebrate life.  It is a call to remember.

And this church, dedicated to the Holy Trinity stands as a physical foundation of our Schoenstatt history over these last 100 years.  It stands as a symbol, hewn out of strong rock which can be seen throughout the surrounding countryside, of the many trials we have faced.  It is also a reminder of how, in each trial and impossible situation, our Mother and Queen Thrice Admirable of Schoenstatt, watched over us and protected us from the most frightful dangers.  It is a reminder of how she always, in these 100 years, has remained faithful to her part of the covenant of love.  She has never failed us.

The Schoenstatt Sisters made a promise that if God delivered Fr. Kentenich from the Dachau concentration camp, they would build a church to glorify the Trinity, who has guided every the step of our way.  It was not possible to build this church until after Fr. Kentenich’s return from exile in Milwaukee.  But in this too, is the guiding hand of Divine Providence.  This Adoration Church was to become the final testimony of Fr. Kentenich’s life.  At 7am on 15 September 1968, Fr. Kentenich prepared for Mass, his first mass in this newly built church.  It would also be his final resting place.  In God’s perfect plan of love, after celebrating the Eucharist on that morning in the last days of summer, Jesus gently took this good and faithful servant by the hand and led him home.

This final moment was so perfect in every way that we cannot be sad.  We can only give thanks for a life that was so fully lived and a life that continues today in heaven where he can finally rest and delight in the eternal resurrection.

We join in this feast of thanksgiving, offering our prayers of gratitude, joy, praise and love, thanking God for having given us such a flaming example to follow.

As the bells continue to ring from the Adoration Church, calling us from all corners of the earth to this pilgrimage of our Jubilee, we place ourselves at the disposition of our Blessed Mother and the Triune God, so that He can continue to work his marvels through us, through Schoenstatt in the next 100 years.

With joy on this Resurrection Sunday, we echo Fr. Kentenich’s words in the Hymn of the Home:

Do you know the land imbued with joy because the sun never sets there: where in possession of the eternal goods all hearts abide in tranquillity; where heart and will are continually refreshed in the overflowing richness of God’s gifts; where love’s magic wand swiftly transforms all gloom into joy?

This wonderland is known to me – it is the meadow radiantly lit by Tabor’s sun, where our Thrice Admirable Lady reigns in the midst of her favourite children, loyally rewarding each gift of love with the manifestation of her glory and immeasurably abundant fruitfulness: It is my home, my Schoenstatt Land!

Dedicated especially to Sr Eleonarde, Sr Edith, Sr Mary-Teresa and Sr Augusta on the occasion of their DIAMOND JUBILEE;    Sr Glynis , Sr Elinor, Sr Margarita and Sr Kathleen on the occasion of their GOLDEN JUBILEE and Sr Joanne on the occasion of her SILVER JUBILEE; and to ten priests who have been in my prayers during this Lenten journey.