IN A FEW WORDS, Fr. Joaquín Alliende. Upon becoming the new archbishop for the enormous metropolis of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio announced his entire future pastoral plan, which can be summarised in three points. The first element was one of his linguistic inventions.
1. – “Sanctuarize Buenos Aires”
2. – “Set out on the road” – Pilgrimages and processions: go to those who we are missing.
3. – “Belonging” – Do not be stingy with baptism. Do not make too many demands on the faithful, who by asking for baptism want to belong to a family, to be someone, so that from Christ they can stop being a grey nobody.
Allow me to compare the essence of this triad with the central document of 18.10.1914: our Founding Document.
1. – “Sanctuarize” means to “make a sanctuary,” offer heaven a place, ask the Trinity to kiss and claim a piece of our land. Our founder brought many things together on that Sunday in October during the harvest month of 1914, the year of the Great War. He offered and asked the Mother of Jesus and the Church to “take possession,” so that she herself can sanctuarize that forested and forgotten valley alongside the Rhine with her special mercy.
2. – “Set out on the road.” Half a century later, this is what Vatican II would describe theologically as “God’s pilgrim people.” On that October 18th, Joseph Kentenich, pointed to a new age. He simultaneously proposed the means by which to carry out this unheard of plan to the boys. The means was the person of the Blessed Mother, it was the shrine from which she would form instruments for a new future in the Trinitarian life here on earth. But all they had to offer her was a small shed where the garden tools were stored. It would become hers, a cradle, her home from which to attract many, give them a place to put down roots, transform them and send them out to jointly decide the course of history. Everything that preceded it was a demand to be shaken, to be moved, to head towards new ambitious goals. Now, this “attract” that our Blessed Mother talks about in the Founding Document is to captivate, invite, leave behind our daily habitat and our old customs that have become rags. It is to follow the voice of the secret magnet that urgently calls us.
3. – Belonging. For Cardinal Bergoglio, this word meant inclusion, welcoming someone into the family of the Church. In the Founding Document, this is the grace of rootedness, it means to provide a home in which our Mother is the Educator of the fullness of baptism.
The three graces of the shrine and all of our founder’s pedagogy takes on its full meaning when it is seen in the light of the central purpose of Vatican II, which is also the framework for Pope Francis’ current pastoral proposals. He is the common denominator, the providential father to celebrate Schoenstatt’s Jubilee. He is the right person to send us out again as instruments for the “Marian Renewal of the World in Jesus Christ.” Even more so from October 18, 2014 onwards.
Fr. Joaquín Alliende L.
Original: Spanish – Translation: Sarah-Leah Pimentel, South Africa
