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Father Joseph
Kentenich
Father Joseph Kentenich is the founder of the
Schoenstatt Family. He was born on November 18, 1885, in the city of Gymnich (Germany). In 1906, he entered the community of the Pallotine
Fathers and was ordained a priest in 1910. Two years later, he was assigned
Spiritual Director of a group of students from the lower seminary of the
Pallotine Fathers. As an educator, he carried out a prolific task among
these young men; a task that culminated on October 18, 1914, with the
Covenant of Love with the Virgin Mary in a small Shrine at Schoenstatt
(Germany). Fr. Kentenich and his young students invited her to spiritually
establish herself there and to make it into a place of pilgrimage. This
event constitutes the founding of the Schoenstatt Movement. From that time
on, he devoted his life to the Schoenstatt Family around the world.
Father Joseph Kentenich suffered two great trials during
his lifetime as Founding Father. During World War II, Nazism confined him
for three and a half years in the Dachau concentration camp.
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the Church itself. On May 31, 1949, Father Kentenich sent a letter to the
German bishops while visiting the Schoenstatt Family in the town of
Bellavista (Chile). The letter explained the crusade of organic love,
thinking, and living to which the Schoenstatt Family had been called to
undertake. The Holy Office separated him from his task and relegated him for
a period of fourteen years to the city of Milwaukee in the United States.
This must not astound us if we consider the fate of other founding fathers
throughout the Church's history. These are the trials that God sets upon us to purify the faith and the bestowal of
his instruments and to make them fruitful in the presence of the grace,
which flows, from the Cross. The rehabilitation came about at the conclusion
of Vatican Council II, when the new vision of the Church made it possible
for his case to be reconsidered and, finally, he was reinstituted in the
Schoenstatt Family. In 1965, Paul VI gave him complete liberty and, years
later, John Paul II extolled his personality within the Church and gave
complete assurance of his charisma as founding father of the Schoenstatt
Movement.
Fr. Kentenich died on September 15, 1968, leaving to the
world as his legacy a Work of Universal Dimensions.
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