The Covenant of Love with Mary is Schoenstatt’s original form for living the baptismal covenant. It expresses and safeguards our covenant with the Blessed Trinity. Understood in this way, it is “the source of vitality and the center of Schoenstatt’s spirituality,” the heart of Schoenstatt.
Love for Mary, expressed in this Covenant, is transformed into the quickest and surest way to live in an alive and permanent contact with the God of our life and of our history. Through the Covenant of Love, we become “Family,” since all who seal the Covenant know and feel they are children of Mary, and thus, brothers and sisters to each other.
From this Covenant of Love, lived in depth, a strong sense of mission also comes forth; it leads those who seal it to become effective instruments in the hands of Mary in order to collaborate with her in the religious-moral renewal of the world. Through this Covenant of Love, Schoenstatt fulfills its commitment to construct history in childlike dependence and contact, freely and totally for Christ, the Lord of History through Mary, His permanent Collaborator.
The Covenant of Love- the Schoenstatt Family’s essence of being
For the Schoenstatt Family this Covenant of Love is the essence and the nucleus of their life; this is what the representatives of all the Schoenstatt Family once again joyfully discovered and unanimously affirmed recently at Conference 2014: “It is with great joy and gratitude that we renew our covenant of love with the Blessed Mother, fully aware that this is the essence of our family. This quiet act of faith of Fr. Kentenich with a small group of sodalists is still alive within us, just as fresh as it ever was during the founding moment in the original shrine on 18 October 1914. We were surprised to discover that our deep faith in the reality of the covenant of love with the Blessed Mother is what moves and inspires us globally. This is the source of our fruitfulness and the concrete way in which live and follow Christ.”
