> 1934 – Fr Zeppenfeld’s Speech

1934 – Bringing our Hero Sodalists Home

Fr Zeppenfeld’s speech

At 9 a.m. on Sunday a solemn Requiem was celebrated by the Pallottine Vice-General Superior from Rome. Fr Zeppenfeld, one of the first members of the Federation who had met the hero sodalists during the war, spoke about the grain of wheat that has to be planted into the earth if it is to bring forth rich fruit.

The large Schoenstatt Family is celebrating a very special kind of family feast. It is the expression of its experience of the way the fate of the founder generation was inwardly united. This generation is the grain of wheat that is planted into the earth. These young heroes sacrificed themselves so that through the oblation of their lives God’s kingdom might again come to us and our times, and that Christi’s mystical body might grow towards its perfection. It is for this reason that our souls are filled with jubilant gratitude because God accepted their lives and their love. They were in very truth great and heroic people. We have to see their striving and their battle against the dark background of the war. We will have to have met them out there and experienced some of the glow of their souls. Their most outstanding quality was their strong and holy love for the Mother Thrice Admirable in the Schoenstatt shrine, and their clear and unwavering orientation to their great and radiant goal. It was their personal ideal, which they had recognized clearly and which they were struggling to attain before the war summoned them to leave Schoenstatt. They remained faithful to their Mother and their ideal in an atmosphere that made superhuman demands on them. So their whole life was nothing else than self-surrender to Schoenstatt and its mission for the world.

We, too, belive in Schoenstatt’s mission. But we are deeply convinced that the rock on which the Family is built is the unconditional self-surrender of the entire person. If we want to be full members of the Family, we will not just have to be daring, or make one or the other sacrifice, we will have to commit our entire selves. It will always depend on one thing: Whether there are people in our ranks whose life of prayer and sacrifice has matured to the heroism of ultimate self-surrender, who have been enkindled by the spirit of the hero sodalists, and who make Christ’s words a reality: To give their lives day by day in order to lose them for Christ and his kingdom.

In these days we read about a meeting of Spanish youth. 15000 young people attended. They remembered the many who sacrificed themselves, who sacrificed their lives for Christ and his Church in the confusion of the civil war. The names of the fallen were read out and as each name was read all responded in chorus: ‘Present! Forwards!’ At this Holy Mass, when the dead are remembered, the names of our fallen will be mentioned: Hans Wormer, Max Brunner! Our hearts must cry out to heaven: ‘Present! Forwards!’ Yes, there are in our midst. Their graves in the shadow of the shrine are not places of death, but of life.