1. “Who has a mission must fulfill it” (Lecture of may 31st, 1949)
“I cannot stop preaching!” said Father Kentenich in his memorable lecture of May 31st,
1949, at the newly blessed Shrine of Bellavista. In the “Epistle perlonga” our Father says
that men and the Church have a “mechanistic thinking”: they separate earth from heaven,
and therefore man is gets away with all earthly things from God. This mentality produces a
forceless, weak Christianity, without intimacy with God, filled with rules, rituals and
customs but not life. In this same sermon he justifies his doing by saying “Who has a
mission must fulfill it, even if a mortal leap follows another one. A prophet´s mission
always brings with it a prophet´s destiny”.
According to our Father´s thinking, there must be love to ensure life, and if experience of
living in the other´s heart is unknown, it cannot be understood the meaning of being in God
´s heart. In the same way, Father Kentenich describes today´s man as somebody who, by
separating God of his own life, he cannot recognize himself as a son, and therefore cannot
accept His will. His pride makes him to believe that everything can be achieved without
God. That interrupts the integration of Faith with Life.
Schoenstatt teaches us an “organic thinking”, it is to live everyday´s life as a way to God.
Marian devotion does not separate us from God but on the contrary, it conducts us to Him.
The love to our Father and his teaching does not separate us from God, but take us to Him.
The love between spouses does not separate us from God, but it takes us directly to God´s
heart. Schoenstatt family should understand the importance of this, as to make possible to
exert a powerful influence on the Church destinies. This was later expressed in the sentence
“Schoenstatt, heart of the Church”. Schoenstatt is at the Church´s service.
“We have been called from here”
“We can see that Occident marches to its ruin and we believe that we are called from here
to rescue from that destiny. We believe that we must offer ourselves as instruments to impel
a countercurrent that goes back to the countries from which we have received their
culture.”
During his Latin Americans trips, Father Kentenich could appreciate how different are the
way of being and thinking of Latin and European peoples. He found in the Latin soul an
innate organic thinking. The filial Shrines found that their mission was to return back the
Graces of the Original Shrine, enriched with a “local colour”, and with the Graces that
Providence has dispensed to them.
This counter- current of Graces is a mission of the whole Schoenstatt family, mainly of the
Latin American peoples.
“To unmask and radically heal”
“The challenge is to unmask and to radically heal the germ of the disease that has
overtaken the occidental soul: the mecanicist thinking. I have enough reasons to suppose
that God has imposed this heavy burden on our Family”. (May 31st, 1949).

2. The mecanicist reasoning analyzes the reality; distinguish parts or aspects of it, not to
integrate them but to oppose one to another.
The mecanicist love is a sick way to become related to persons, things and places. It is not
able to establish personal and stable ties to them.
The life of the mecanicist man is atomized, disaggregated and discontinuous. Father
Kentenich claims that this type of conduct is destroying the linking organism as much at the
natural as at the supernatural levels. His proposal is to combat this “bug” that is
contaminating the world is the configuration of a ”new man in a new community”. To reach
this, is necessary to build an linking culture.
In our days, the impersonal ant sterile ties are increasing. In example, this can observed in
the way our youngsters dancing. Usually they dance alone, without a couple or conforming
circles with strangers. It is quite common to dance the whole night with people with whom
not a single word is interchanged. It is possible to create in Facebook a person completely
different to what I really am; I can project a personality with values contraries to those that
live by. This allows me to hide who I really am, and even if I might be successful in getting
in touch with someone in a distant city, I might fail in my ability of daily interacting with
the actual persons of my surroundings. This confirms Kentenich´s teaching about
mecanicism. A fake tie is created with persons who become more and more unreal. We
should seriously consider the consequences of these modern tendencies. If a person gets
away from the real persons around him, he does not have to give reasons to anyone nor is
responsible for anybody. In this emptiness, the individual has all the time for himself.
“Crusade for the organic thinking, loving and living”
The destiny of Occident stood at Father Kentenich´s vision: the chance to originate a new
culture that could incarnate the harmony between Nature and Grace. To defeat the
mecanicist mentality, it was necessary a new crusade for an organic way of thinking, loving
and living. Those that think organically tend to see persons or facts in an integral reality.
Those are able to see the parts as a whole. Those do not separate in a mecanicist way what
is vitally united. It is “and –and” instead of “either this or that”. The organic man captures
the organic relation between Nature and God. This explains the reason why he can see and
love God in and through the creatures. Creatures are “image, road and warranty” of their
love to God, and not obstacles for this. The organic thinking is an spirituality particularly
suitable for the layman who lives within the world. The relationship with God is the
backbone of the entire organism of attachments.
Creatures are "images", they are "footprints, expressions, or greetings" of God. God is not
seen and loved just by being Himself, or by being "absolutely different", but also in relation
to creatures, in its immanence.
But our Father was not interested in just a "theory" of the organism of attachments. He was
interested specifically in a ”praxis," in a spirituality and pedagogy of relations. He aimed to
cultivate and develop a kind of man who thinks, loves, living organically, a type of man to
form and grow healthily as it integrates the dual natural and supernatural organism of
attachments,.

3. "Schoenstatt has never strayed from this path. It developed a way to holiness of everyday
life, even in its smallest details. It enables modern man to maintain his relationship with
the living God in all situations. The saint of daily life wants to unite all, close and tightly
with the Living God, not only in theory or in the Church, but in everyday´s life ".
Schoenstatt must be the germ of a new culture, a new social order. Today´s Christians
should be so by conviction and by his willing in order to swim against the current. We want
to generate a new culture. This requires awareness of mission and a creative attitude. This
is the dilemma: either we generate new forms or the environment will form us. We are
creators of a different lifestyle, or we blend into the environment. Kentenich asks us: in
what way are we different? Do we have a way to be different?
What the Father seeks is a Marian renewal of the world. He wishes to build Mary´s
Kingdom here on earth. He synthesizes this with a “basic law”: through our binding to
Mary we arrive at the Marian attitude or lifestyle. From that source we must draw the
strength to transform reality and come to form a Marian style of living and working.
It is not enough to analyze realities; we must go down to the concrete reality of our family.
We want to apply the spirit of the Evangelical Counsels of our own family, as a living cell
of the Church and society. If we do not start at our homes, the rest becomes an utopia, a
collection of generic ideals that do not embodies life. It is essential to review the scale of
values and customs which are the stake, and expose some customs deeply rooted in our
people, which we cannot support
To speak of Schoenstatt habits or lifestyle, it is important to do so lucidly, because we face
a historic challenge. We are no longer protected by Christian customs: we live a Christian
diaspora. This faces us with to a double imperative: first a critical attitude, and secondly, to
encourage, creatively and with awareness of mission, new customs.
If we think and love in an organic way, it follows that we shall live organically. We seek to
enrich our customs. We will assume some of them from our environment if they are
positive. Not everything that surrounds us is wrong. In our Schoenstattian homes there have
been brewing many healthy habits that correspond to our spirit. Now, sometimes these
customs received by families of Schoenstattian tradition or environment, must be motivated
and consciously assumed. This is an important requirement because of the environmental
clash to which we are subjected. When a person has a clear sense of mission, he is not
confined only to resist the atmosphere of its surroundings, but also he seeks to transform
and conquer it. Thus, we shall be really building a new world.
Customs do not arise only when it is assumed that they exist. They also have to be
developed “on purpose". Customs are generated and strengthened by repetition of actions.
But to make them fruitful, they must be acts that respond to a motivation and values, in
such a way that we feel that the effort to establish the habit is worth it, because it ennobles
and enriches our person. We have in mind the wealth of power developed in our family life,
new customs from the personal and marriage ideals that has been given to us. However, due
to original sin, in order to keep these customs, it is necessary to keep a high spirit. If the

4. spirit declines, customs become formalism, a shell. They keep the outside, but no longer
have the inner spirit strength.
Thist is why Father Kentenich called us to be "with the ear in the heart of God and the
hand on the pulse of the time”, so we can act, to undertake and prophetically shape the
future.
This word transforms us in searchers of the footprints of God's Providenc,e and discoverers
of his intentions, both in our own life and in the life of the Church and of the society. For
this reason, Faith in Divine Providence requires us audacity, strength and ability of risk. To
follow God’s love in the chiaroscuro of the faith requires jumps - and often fatal jumps - to
the intellect, the will and the heart.
The God of the Providence is the God of the Covenant (Alliance), the Covenant requires us
to be His partners. He approaches us, reveals His ways; we are taken into account as His
allied sons and daughters. He makes us responsible for tasks that He gives us. It is not
simply a God who intervenes in our lives and the history to tell us how we must act. He
visits us, He dialogues with us.
Father Kentenich highlights the "meditation of life" as a particularly necessary practice for
those who want to commune with the God present in our life and in the scene of the world.
This form of meditation allows us "to pre-taste", " to enjoy" and "to post-taste" the events
of our lives, and in this process, to follow His prints to be convinced of his presence and
love for us, and to respond to His requirements.
This is the mission that our Father left us in Bellavista. He wants that “organic living"
becomes palpable and that no one can tell us that May 31 is "complicated". If someone says
so, we can answer: look how we live, look how we speak, look at how we love, look how
we have fun, look how our style of life is,… this is to live May 31st.