By Maria Fischer/Editorial schoenstatt.org •
We filled the jars with our gifts: with our gratitude and repentance, with our surrender and longing.
During the years of preparation for the jubilee of the covenant of love, the Pilgrimage Prayer 2014 was prayed, in a dozen languages in the Shrines all around the world and in the midst of daily life. Perhaps we haven’t to pray with those words, but the jar of the Original Shrine continues to be filled. Many people personally bring their gifts to the Original Shrine, and there are also many who bring the gifts of their relatives, friends and companions of the Schoenstatt Movement. Many more do it virtually, using the “direct line to the Original Shrine” of Schoenstatt.org.
Every couple of weeks, someone in Schoenstatt – Hildgard Beck, of the Institute of Our Lady of Schoenstatt; Fr. Egon Zillekens, or the Wewelers – receive an envelope with messages, prayer requests and offerings sent via Schoenstatt.org, and sometimes someone from the website team takes the pages of petitions on pilgrimage to the Original Shrine. That is how it was on July 9, when more than 800 printed letters literally filled the jar.
There are people who write every day, others do it in moments of great joy or need. On July 9, letters sent from Argentina, France, Paraguay, Spain, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, South Africa, Croatia, Germany, Austria, Venezuela, United States, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Switzerland were presented.
When Pope Francis visited South America, he sincerely asked: pray for me. There were dozens of letters in the jar in the Original Shrine for the Blessed Mother to “read”: Bless Pope Francis on his trip through Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay…and in this way, the small Original Shrine joined Pope Francis’ “Altar de Maiz” [“Corn Altar”] at the large Holy Mass on Sunday, July 12; which contained the handwritten prayers two hundred thousand coconuts.
Original: Spanish. Translation: Celina M. Garza, San Antonio, TX USA
