Dear Families and Friends of Schoenstatt,

Our Schoenstatt Family of Austin sends you our heartfelt greetings of this Blessed Christmas Season. In the spirit of this Holy Season, we want to share the joyful news of a year filled with many blessings and to thank you for your prayers and your support.

Our apostolic work in Austin this year has brought us much to celebrate and much to continue! The great fruitfulness of our Schoenstatt spirituality shines through numerous endeavors, all of which are steadily growing in size and vitality:

The Rosary Campaign is steadily growing with more coordinators monthly who share the Pilgrim Blessed Mother to an ever-expanding circle of those receiving her in their homes and lives. Another vibrant branch within the Rosary Campaign is the Hispanic Young Adults that is active in many parishes with Hispanic ministry across the Diocese. Mothers’ Groups, both north and central Austin, study and pray together to build the spiritual lives of families through their commitment to take the Blessed Mother as the Model and Teacher of mothering and family formation.

Work among the University of Texas students has grown tremendously through the dedication of dozens of very active and visionary young men and women in the Founders’ Circle of the Schoenstatt University Men and the Schoenstatt University Women. These young adults have created extraordinary opportunities of deep faith formation through retreats, pilgrimages to the Shrines in Lamar and in San Antonio, sealing their Covenants of Love with the Blessed Mother and recognizing their faith as the compass for their lives. As we watch these young adults of the Founding Generation graduate and take up their professional lives, we are all incredibly inspired by their selfless service and commitment to take Schoenstatt deep into their lives and also out into the world.

This Founding Generation has also given us our first UT vocation to the priesthood: In January Mark Leatherman enters the Schoenstatt Fathers’ novitiate in Santiago, Chile. And one of Mark’s course brothers will be Juan Pablo Cruz, of the second UT-Austin-based team of Operation Mario, the missionary outreach team of Chilean young men who come to UT yearly to share their faith. Operation Mario students’ missionary commitment is to share their faith and their rich Catholic community culture from Santiago with everyone they meet.

In the last four years, Operation Mario has brought four groups of three college men per year to Austin to live, study and share their apostolic zeal and vibrant Schoenstatt spirit with their new American friends. In addition, a number of our young men and young women from UT have had the opportunity join in the exchange by spending weeks or months in Santiago, Chile, living and studying among the Schoenstatt university students, their families and the Schoenstatt religious communities as part of their own study-abroad opportunities and their further deepening of their life of faith and service to others.

The launch of Operation Mario four years ago marked the beginning of the Schoenstatt Movement as a visible presence at UT. During this time we have provided a growing cycle of retreats, weekly or bi-weekly gatherings for young men and for young women, weekly Adoration at the University Catholic Center opened to all students, regular opportunities to make short pilgrimages to the Schoenstatt Marian Shrines in San Antonio and in Lamar, as well as a “home-away-from-home” with various activities and community gatherings at our Austin movement center on Addie Roy in west Austin, about 8 miles from campus.

In addition to our Schoenstatt Fathers, Fr. Christian Christensen and Fr. Jesus Ferras, our Schoenstatt community as a whole and the UT Schoenstatt women in particular are also blessed to have regular visits from a consecrated religious woman, Andrea Musalem, from the Institute of Our Lady of Schoenstatt, a religious community founded in Germany to give witness to consecrated life lived in the secular professional world. Andrea visits Austin a few times each semester leading special retreats and planting the seeds for the ongoing formation of the young Catholic women at UT, those entering their professions, and other women’s groups. Andrea’s visits strengthen each group’s work for meeting life with renewed confidence and strength that is grounded in faith.

Schoenstatt families and other Catholic home-schooling families that gather under the mantle of Annunciation Austin have welcomed many new families, as well as expanding the program this year to include preschool. Annunciation Austin children meet together with teachers for two days weekly of core-subject instruction at St. Thomas More in north Austin. This classroom+home education is guided by experienced and well-trained teachers who integrate every aspect of learning with a firm foundation of faith, family values, and Schoenstatt spirituality. Fr. Christian meets weekly with the children, providing them the gifts of his priestly and fatherly insights for their formation and also the opportunity for special times for the sacrament of Reconciliation especially attuned to the needs of children.

The Schoenstatt family is incredibly blessed by the gifts of each and every individual in our growing community. These gifts are a beautiful garden of life and faith . . . contributions to our Lady and, through her, to Christ and to the Church. We have witnessed great gifts beyond all measure from the tremendous work and community spirit that has cared for and continually improved the Chapel House and the Youth House at our Movement Center at Addie Roy. This same selfless giving from many others also has provided the warm family gatherings and wonderful shared meals after the monthly (third Sunday each month) Masses commemorating our Covenant Day and has brought us together for special celebrations and special times of prayer. Each project undertaken in the houses or on the land, as well as each gathering, each time of shared prayers, each Mass or each retreat, provides a living testimony to the family spirit that abounds and is a clear witness to the heart and life of a community grounded in its love and devotion to the Blessed Mother.

As we all join with Mary’s and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem, we of the Schoenstatt Movement are humbled by our many possibilities to participate . . . time and again, season following season . . . in the spiritual lives of so many wonderful people in the Austin area. We are even more humbled to realize that what we share and what we bring as the message of Schoenstatt for the renewal of our spiritual lives, the renewal of our families and the renewal of our world is indeed making a positive difference for so many!

We thank you for your presence in our lives, as part of our Schoenstatt family or one of our special friends. We thank you for your gifts, spiritual and material, and ask for your continued prayers for our work. We welcome any gift you feel called to make. It is through your generosity and that of many others that we are able to continue to grow our Schoenstatt family community presence in the Austin area and at UT. Your generosity allows us to outreach to Catholics at all ages and stages of life who are seeking to deepen their faith and to take up a special relationship with the Blessed Mother on a lifetime journey: practical steps to strong faith and everyday sanctity for the renewal of the world in Christ.

Every gift helps us in continuing and strengthening our Schoenstatt life in the Austin area and our gifts into the Catholic community and helps us as we draw ever closer to our goal of a Schoenstatt Shrine to the Blessed Mother here in Austin.

United in prayers for a Holy Christmas and a blessed New Year,

Fr. Jesus Ferras, ISP
Diocesan Director
Schoenstatt Movement of Austin

Ruben Montez, William Penn, PhD, Adrienne Kennedy and Fr. Christian Christensen, ISP
For the Board of Directors, the Schoenstatt Movement of Austin

Dear Schoenstatt Family and friends,

Warmest Advent greetings to you all! This blessed season opens to each of us a sweet time of identification with our Blessed Mother as we wait with her for the coming of the Christ Child and like her prepare to receive him. There are several events for us to come together to celebrate this season!

On the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday (Joyful Sunday!), there will be an Advent celebration at the movement house - Deck the Halls of Bethlehem! Everyone is invited to celebrate Mass at 11am, followed by a potluck. Afterwards we will decorate our little houses of Bethlehem for the Advent and Christmas season - and how beautiful that we should have the chance to prepare our own "Bethlehem" to receive Christ! Your branch leaders should be contacting you to organize gathering decoration donations. (If you'd like to lend additional help please contact me at admin@schoenstatt.us). Also, if you would like to bring your own Baby Jesus from your home nativities to be blessed, please bring them along (it is a Gaudete Sunday tradition of the Church).

Also, we will continue with the tradition of praying an Advent Novena on the 9 days leading up to the day before Christmas Eve. Beginning Tuesday, Dec 15 and ending Wednesday Dec 23rd, each night a novena will be lead in the Chapel house from 7-8pm.

The Covenant Day Adoration and Covenant Mass will follow the normal schedule, please see below!

DECEMBER

Dec 13th - Deck the Halls of Bethlehem (beginning 11am)
Dec 15-23rd - Advent Novena (7-8pm)
Dec 18th - Covenant Day Adoration (7-9pm)
Dec 20th - Covenant Mass (beginning 11am)

Yours in the heart of Mary,

Rachel Gardner
Communications Coordinator

Dear Schoenstatt Family and Rosary Campaign Coordinators,

We were so glad to see many of you at the Covenant Mass yesterday, what a special day! We are so proud of Mark, grateful for his “yes” and also grateful to Fr. Jesus for the wonderful work he is doing with the University Men! Now we must support Mark with our daily prayers as he beings his novitiate. It will be many years of studies!

Our Heavenly Father and our dear MTA have blessed our diocese with the pilgrimage of the Father Eye Symbol during this important week. Today, November 16th, we celebrate Fr. Kentenich’s 124th birthday. What a blessing that through this symbol he is spiritually united with us! Also, we will celebrate Covenant Day on Wednesday the 18th and the Father Eye Symbol will be present at the Wayside Shrine at St. Margaret Mary. For those of you who were not able to attend the Covenant Mass at Addie Roy, please join us at St. Margaret Mary Parish in Cedar Park. We will begin at 6pm. Everyone is invited!! Victor and I will give a presentation on the Father Eye symbol.

Let us give Fr. Kentenich a special personal gift today! Be creative! We can reflect on our own lives and ask ourselves, “What would my life be without Schoenstatt?

In joyful gratitude, one heart in the Father! (Texas Motto for the year!)

View a small clip of Fr. Kentenich on You Tube at the schoenstatt.de website.

United in our Covenant,

Victor and Olga Alegria
Sch. Rosary Campaign