9. Revealing the Mystery of Mary
Perhaps the most fervent and comprehensive self - revelation made by Fr Kentenich is found in the following short quotation, which brings our collection of autobiographical texts to a close.
It is taken from an address given in the Exile Shrine in Milwaukee on the occasion of his 73rd birthday in 1958. When we consider the difficult circumstances surrounding his birth, these words shed all the more light on his belief, which grew over the years to become a conviction, that he had already been called in his mother’s womb to proclaim the “mystery of Mary” to the world.
This text can also be found in J. Kentenich, With Mary into the New Millennium (Waukesha 2001), p. 160 f.
During the last few weeks we have heard on several occasions those words that God spoke to the Prophet Isaiah, “Before you were conceived in your mother’s womb, I had chosen you and called you by your name: You are mine!” (cf. Jer 1,5; Is 49,1; 43,1). Those words apply in a unique way to today, to the celebration that has united us today in the shrine. What does that mean, “I have called you by your name: You are mine”? It means, first of all, that God called me into existence. We believe that God spoke those words seventy - three years ago today. He said, I have called you out of nothingness into existence! Seventy - three years ago he called me by my name and said: You are mine! What does that mean? He said: You are mine, with your original character and with your original mission.
When we examine St Paul to see what mission he had been given, he would say: I was given the mission to proclaim the mystery of Christ to the world – Christ the Redeemer, the Mediator, the Head of his Mystical Body. Involuntarily we ask ourselves today: What was the mission that was handed over to me seventy - three years ago? With a sideglance at St Paul, I think I may say that it was and is my mission to proclaim the mystery of Mary to the world. It is my task to make the Blessed Mother known, to reveal her to our times as the permanent helpmate of our Lord in his entire work of redemption, as the Co - redemptrix and Mediatrix of Grace; as Mother of God, deeply united with our Lord – a two - in - oneness – with her specific mission from her Schoenstatt shrine for our present times.
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