A Community that wants to be Mary for our time

Father Joseph Kentenich (1885-1968) founded the Secular Institute of the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary in 1926. The Schoenstatt Sisters, with its motherhouse in Germany, provide inspiration and leadership for the Schoenstatt Movement. Their charism is to be Mary and to work like Mary, in the world so that people may encounter Christ in and through them. 

The Schoenstatt mission for the Church is “to contribute to the sanctification of the world from within (Lumen Gentium 31).”

“The origin of our family is not…a great idea,” Father Kentenich said in 1966. “It is a life process. Analogous to the origin of Christianity: a life process, a covenant of love of the Eternal Word with human nature…a covenant of love of the Triune God through his exponent, the Blessed Mother…and the Schoenstatt Family.” 

Our Lady–the Mother Thrice Admirable, Queen, and Victress of Schoenstatt–leads the order to a personal relationship with the Triune God, with its founder, and with all who have sealed that covenant of love. The Schoenstatt Shrine in Schoenstatt, Germany provides a seal for this covenant of love. 

In June 1948, during a trip to the United States, Father Kentenich came to Corpus Christi to visit Bishop Emmanuel Ledvina and promised the bishop to send sisters to his diocese. The following year, on Sept. 10, 1949, three sisters arrived in the Diocese of Corpus Christi by boat from South Africa. Two months later, three more sisters came from Germany, and later other sisters came.

The 1949 school year had already begun when the sisters arrived, so they could not take up the promised teaching positions. Instead, they were employed in household tasks at the Cathedral rectory and worked in various parishes taking the census. Later on, they served as teachers at Sacred Heart School in Rockport. 

In 1959, 10 years after their arrival, they purchased property in Lamar from the diocese where they built a replica of the Schoenstatt Shrine, a convent house and a retreat center. From the date of their arrival in the diocese, the Schoenstatt Sisters have served in the diocese through its Schoenstatt spirituality–as teachers, in parish work, in hospitals and social work, as well as conducting retreats, workshops and group meetings for all age groups including children, youth and adults. 

It is important to the sisters to foster an atmosphere of prayer and silence in their convents. Like everything they do, their prayer life tries to imitate Mary’s prayerful surrender. Their covenant relationship with Mary and their attachment to the Shrine make all their activities an offering to God.

The sister’s daily spiritual exercises include morning and evening prayer, Holy Mass and a half hour of meditation. During the day they make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament and have a spiritual reading, which focuses on Schoenstatt spirituality. All their community prayers, most of them composed by Father Kentenich, have a Marian dimension. These times of “interiority” are essential to the sisters’ work and to their mission of serving others. 

As an extension of their prayer times, they strive to create a prayerful atmosphere to sanctify each moment of the day. With and like Mary, they long to make each day a prayer by recognizing and fulfilling God’s will as it presents itself in the circumstances of the day. They view their prayers for those entrusted to their care as a concrete form of evangelization.

As a secular institute, the Schoenstatt Sisters distinguish intern and extern members. Extern members live alone, and intern members lead a community life. But every Sister of Mary belongs to a house and a province and in this way participates in community life. 

Where they live as a community, the mealtimes spent together offer them an opportunity to deepen their family spirit and to draw new strength from the joy in each other. The sisters also plan times for relaxation into the daily schedule. In this way, family bonds grow in which the most diverse creative abilities can unfold.

Today, the community of nearly 2,000 sisters extends to all continents, working in 29 countries with members from 35 nations. As a secular institute, they can function as a community in schools, hospitals and social welfare outreach, but also as individuals on an extern post in various fields of secular work. 

In every type of work, the sisters strive to love God and people. Serving at Schoenstatt Centers, which are meant to be “places of religious and moral renewal” and oases of Christian life, is a privilege and central task. This service includes welcoming and offering a natural and spiritual home to pilgrims, as well as retreats and workshops to parishes and the branches of the Schoenstatt Movement. 

Also, some sisters go to the movement’s youth, mothers and family groups to assist in their spiritual formation in keeping with Schoenstatt’s lay spirituality and pedagogy. The Schoenstatt way of life embraced by priests and laity of every walk of life is an aid to more concretely realize the universal call to holiness which Christ makes of all his disciples. 

Perhaps their most effective outreach is the Schoenstatt Rosary Campaign. An image of Our Lady of Schoenstatt sent from a Schoenstatt Shrine reaches out to everyone, including those on the periphery, promoting Christian values and providing profound encounters with Christ through Mary. In a certain sense, it is a repetition of the Visitation when Mary hurried through the hillsides to bring Christ to Elizabeth, Zachariah and their baby boy John. 

Through the image of Our Lady of Schoenstatt, blessings and graces from the Schoenstatt Shrine are made available to all those who open their homes to Mary: families, schools, jails, nursing homes, hospices and hospitals.