An altar boy remembers

In Memoriam, Father Albert Ripberger

Un país con cinco santuarios de Schoenstatt... A country with five Schoenstatt Shrines Ein Land mit fünf Schönstatt-Heiligtümern Fotos: StckXchnge © 2008

SOUTH AFRICA, Simon Donnelly. When I was small, we usually went to Holy Mass to the same place, a considerable distance away from our home parish, out of the southern Cape Town suburb where I grew up, into the wooded areas on the bottom slopes of the Constantia mountain (on the Hout Bay road), where the houses used to be found far back from the road down winding lanes, on land that was only part inhabited and partly cleared. We went there for one reason: to pray in a small chapel, a place of many graces, that I knew was the house of Our Lady. A bell tower poked out of the top of the chapel, covered as it was — and is still — in creeping ivy, surrounded by beautiful flowers in rockeries. Just across the path leading to the wooden doors lived a house of many sisters: kind, angelic sisters, who loved children, who were generous and loving to the many visitors who came to the small shrine.

Some people came in joy, others in grief. It was clear to me: there was something very particular about this place. The chapel radiated warmth and life. Light and life shone out of its stained glass windows in the late afternoon evening, In the daytime, the door was wide open. In a warm summer afternoon, the calls of birds came in the windows, and a gentle summer breeze would make the candles in front of the tall, noble wooden altar of Our Lady flicker. The inside smelled of pine needles during Advent, and always of candles. But mostly the whole place is simple steeped in prayerfulness, so much so that you can feel it in your bones, in your heart.

My earliest memories of being there are from around 1973. But I had already been there earlier. A German Schoenstatt priest, Father Albert Ripberger, brought me into the faith in Jesus Christ by pouring water over my head and invoking the Holy Spirit, in March 1968. Thus my life in Christ was born. They tell me I screamed throughout.

Children of war

After I became an altar boy, although I ususally served Mass in a provisional Church a little further away, my favourite place to serve the altar was in this shrine of Our Lady, Ter Admirabilis, the Mother and Queen of Schoenstatt. It took many years for me to realise that these sisters, and the two Schoenstatt fathers there had left their home country on the other side of the world, to come to our missionary land, to bring us the good news of Jesus Christ, and to foster in us love for His most precious mother, Mary, whose role as intercessor would change our lives. Fr Ripberger himself had been just a boy when the dreadful Second World War was fought in his native homeland in part. The two German fathers had seen things as children that they could never articulate to us. I cannot imagine what they saw.

A small snapshot memory: my Dad was with Fr Ripberger watching a film one evening in the 1960s. There was an earth tremor in Cape Town, and the lights failed. People stampeded out of the film theatre. My Dad remembers Fr Ripberger being badly shaken, as it took him back to his experience of terrifying air raids during the war.

The founder of the Schoenstatt family (or work or movement), Pallottine Father Joseph Kentenich, had been a marked man during the war. The Nazis had him on a list of wanted people, and finally arrested him in 1942. After solitary confinement in Koblenz, he spent three years in Dachau, the living hell. In the midst of terrible suffering, and great grief, his great trust in the providence of Almighty God remained strong. He came out to continue his work with many young men and young women, and families. He was still to spend 16 years in exile from his beloved Schoenstatt foundation. But, again, his trust remained strong. Dilexit Ecclesiam (‘He loved the Church’), they wrote on his tomb. This is true, too, for Fr Albert Ripberger, even though in a different way, through a long, sometimes turbulent missionary life in South Africa.

Everything matters

Fr Kentenich died on September 15, 1968, when I was six months old. But his thoughts, his ideas, and above all his love for Our Lady and for the Church of her Son, are everywhere in Schoenstatt. "Everything matters", said Fr Kentenich. "We must give our all for all". These sisters seemed to embody that work: everything mattered. Great attention was paid to the liturgy, the singing, the formation of children, the love of spouses for each other, the relation of our local Church to the wider family of shrines and the Church as a whole.

With Fr Ripberger I made my first confession. And then in this little shrine, the Schoenstatt Shrine in Constantia, Cape Town, I received, from Fr Ripberger, first Holy Communion in 1977, nine years into my life. Next to me in my Roman seminary room stands a small plaque from a family in Grassy Park whose children were my friends: "One Bread makes us One Body". It has followed me around the world, to each of the homes I have lived in. In this Year of St Paul, it seems most apt that this gift is still with me. I think Fr Ripberger, with Fr Schneider and the Schoenstatt sisters, intended to make this a living reality in the community of Cape Town: against the ravages of apartheid, we would create a community that worshipped at the same altar, and that was a testimony to what was possible in South Africa. Fr Ripberger took a firm stand against the state-sanctioned policies that separated Black and White and Coloured and Indian people from each other. It was at Schoenstatt that we got to know each other as equals. I didn’t realise until years later that it was a highly unusual experience in the 1970s that people of different races could be at Mass together. Security police spies would come to Mass sometimes to see what we were up to. Fr Ripberger believed firmly in the freedom and the forgiveness that only came many years later with the unbanning of the ANC in 1990 and the freeing of Nelson Mandela from 27 years in prison.

Back in the Upper Room

My most vivid memories of Father Ripberger, who rarely spoke much to us children in the 1970s and 1980s, was of him at the altar in this Shrine: at Benediction, late on ‘Pilgrim Sunday’ (Covenant Sunday) afternoon, once a month. The sweet smell of incense flooded the Shrine: most of us knelt outside, as the Shrine was too tiny to hold more than 30 people. In the summer, the flat stones were warm to my bare knees, in winter they were cold. But we knew, at that moment, when Fr Ripberger held up the Most Blessed Sacrament in the humeral veil covering his cope, that something very important was happening here: no casual gathering this, but something mystical and beautiful and incomprehensible. We were, all of together, back in the Upper Room — the Cenacle — gathered around the Table of the Lord. It was the Last Supper again. And yet His mother was there, and we knelt at her feet. So it was Pentecost again too, and the Spirit was being poured out on the disciples. The whole heavenly host was there: "Blessed be God in his angels and in his saints". I only know the divine praises in English as intoned with Fr Ripberger’s strong German accent.

Also, these shrines go back to the original shrine in Schoenstatt, near a tiny town with a Roman name — Vallendar — on the Rhine River in Germany. That first shrine was the Chapel of St Michael the Archangel. And the archangel is faithfully present in every Schoenstatt shrine. The Holy Spirit is perpetually coming down on the altar: a golden dove on the ceiling above the altar. And Our Lady — three times Admirable, Wonderful, Beautiful — holds her infant Son above the tabernacle, for us to worship and adore.

How many Masses did I serve, with many other altar boys, for Fr Albert Ripberger? Certainly hundreds. And not only at these Shrines, but also, later, at the small local chapel at the priests’ residence, House Sion, on Lansdowne Road, Claremont. A house which had belonged to a sisters’ community became the home of the fathers in the late 1970s. Fr Ripberger — or Fr Schneider or Fr Musgrave — celebrated Holy Mass there every morning at 6.30am. As a boy at high school, when I could get myself out of bed early, I would leave home at 6.15, and ride my bicycle to House Sion, in time to see Fr Ripberger recollected in silence in the small sacristy alongside, then walk quietly into the shrine to begin Mass. Calmly, quietly, in the very first light of the day, he would offer the Divine Liturgy, in his heavy German accent, every th turning into s. Out of all the sermons he ever gave, the word extraordinary always stood out. He had a keen eye on the political and spiritual life and times in South Africa. If I stayed afterwards, I would see him sitting in the last of the four rows, reading the morning office of his breviary. I knew there was a mysterious priestly activity that he was engaged in.

"The people of Crossroads — they are our daily bread".

Fr Ripberger was part of the founder generation of the Schoenstatt movement in Cape Town, along with many dozens of Schoenstatt sisters, who both preceded him by thirty years, and remain the keepers of the five South African Schoenstatt shrines today. In the 1960s, Fr Ripberger had a young people’s group, to which many belonged. They went on, in multiple ways, to do holy work later, in their families, in their parishes, with refugees, in the Catholic media. My own father was one of those young people. When he asked then hospital chaplain, Fr Ripberger, what a young Catholic man could do to help, he indicated that there were some sick people in the giant public hospital in Cape Town, Groote Schuur, who needed visiting, because they were very far from home, and were bewildered by the place they found themselves in.

It was also Fr Ripberger who one evening, drove around the city in his old Volkswagen Beetle one of the young Catholic men who came from a home without a father. Fr Ripberger wanted to tell him about fatherhood, what being a father meant. The young man, who had had no direct experience of his own biological father, thought that ‘father’ was a terrible word. But through Fr Ripberger, that young man went on to discover the fatherhood of Fr Kentenich, and of God the Father himself. The young man went on to be a very good father, a truly loving, generous Christian father. Without Fr Ripberger, acting as an instrument of God, this would never have happened. I’m sure there are many other similar stories that are held in the privacy of people’s hearts.

In the 1980s, the Schoenstatt fathers began work in poor African communities in Cape Town: Crossroads and Khayelitsha (‘New Home’, sardonically named, given than people had no choice in moving there). The only sentence I ever remember Fr Ripberger uttering in my presence alone was one Holy Thursday evening, as we walked back alone in the early winter darkness from placing the Blessed Sacrament at the altar of repose in the Shrine at Constantia, after the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. It was said aloud, to me, but as a thought that was clearly uppermost in his heart that very pensive evening at the start of the Paschal Triduum: "The people of Crossroads — they are our daily bread". I didn’t know what to say, and so the phrase hung there in the cooling darkness, as we worked our way back up the path between the oak trees to where Mass had just been celebrated.

I also remember when Fr Ripberger was attacked at Crossroads: a drunk man threw a brick at him one night, trying to kill him, it seems. Then I remember Fr Ripberger after he had a bad car accident on his way back from Crossroads one night in the 1980s. He was in Groote Schuur for some time. When he came out, he could walk only with great difficulty. And so, every Sunday, at the start of Mass, he walked with crutches to the altar, as he couldn’t make it up the stairs into the sacristy. I remember him at the altar, vesting at the altar in front of everyone, awkward at this public display of what is a most private moment for every priest. For ever after, he would walk with a limp (one shoe with a thick heel, because his legs were no longer the same length).

Three different sermons

Fr Ripberger was in many ways not an easy person. He seemed to get quietly angry about things, and we couldn’t really understand why. He often struggled to communicate in any normal sort of way. His long, winding, sermons were frequently hard to fathom. He drove away, inadvertently, many of his friends. But he was a truly priestly man: the liturgy for him was incredibly serious work. He always sang the Gospel at Sunday Mass, even though his voice was not the best. Mass was not to be hurried. And afterwards came a whole pastoral life as well, that branched out into many activities many of us didn’t know about. My abiding impression is of a man who knew how to take Holy Mass — the Divine Liturgy — seriously. It was God’s own work, and it was solemn. He always wore his German priest’s ‘uniform’: black suit with the white collar edges peeking down from the neck.

Fr Ripberger took his preaching seriously. It was when he was parish priest at Rondebosch Catholic Church in Cape Town in the 1960s that my dad got to know him. One Sunday, on the suspicion that Fr Ripberger never gave the same sermon twice, my dad went to three different Sunday Masses... and, sure enough, Fr Ripberger gave three different sermons. This was a man who took his pastoral life seriously.

Fr Ripberger, with Fr Schneider, provided my first lesson in priestly life: the fundamentals of their priestly life were clearly in place. Fr Ripberger never spoke to me directly about priesthood, and yet, I learned these basic things from him. It was clear, too, that he had the hidden life that every priest must have: a life with Christ Our Lord shared only between priest and God. He was a private man.

Rest in peace

Fr Ripberger and Fr Schneider have been course brothers, with Fr Günther Boll, and others, for over fifty years. It is the longest time to live in Our Lady’s Covenant of Love, the special covenantal union of love made by every Schönstatt father that will last his whole life, indeed the same covenant that every member of every branch in the Schoenstatt family makes. This represents the most intense fraternal sharing in the priestly life.

And so, now, on the last day of the month closest to the Schoenstatt heart, the month of Our Lady’s rosary, Fr Ripberger has died, after a long and painful illness. Part of our Lord’s via crucis to Calvary was given to him to share in. Towards the end, Fr Ripberger could no longer eat. And then at the very end he finally could no longer drink water. His course brother, Fr Schneider, was at his side. To not only share the priestly life of a course brother, but to give him the last rites — Extreme Unction (the sacrament of the sick) — and to accompany him to the last moment of his life earthly life: this is a level of brotherhood that few priests are privileged to share with each other.

Rest in peace, Fr Ripberger. Thank you for the witness you gave to the extraordinary life of Fr Kentenich, and for the extraordinary witness you lived, in your own way, in Cape Town, many thousands of kilometres from the people who gave you life at the beginning. Intercede for us in the kingdom, at the throne of the Lamb. Ask Our Lady, mother and queen, to take care of us, her children who remain in the vineyard of the Lord, to nourish the young plants that you have given life to.