This year the Family Missions celebrated 25 years of life in Argentina. The Schoenstatt Movement celebrated its jubilee by gathering many participants, the missionary families, for a National Congress of the Argentinean Family Missions.
During the weekend of October 10-13, more than 70 missionaries of all ages and vocations gathered. As representatives coming from different dioceses of the country (Córdoba, Mendoza, San Juan, San Luis, Paraná, Chaco, Misiones, La Plata, San Isidro and Buenos Aires), they gathered at the Colegio María de Nazareth, in Córdoba, to celebrate that which brings them all together.
Children, youth, couples, grandparents, lay and consecrated people… Each one of them felt renewed in the awareness that they are protagonists of a missionary style that has a place for all states of life and all ages, and it makes us rediscover with evident clarity that, as children of Schoenstatt, we are a Family.
We do not remain at a standstill, we have a mission
The missionaries experienced that Schoenstatt is not simply a spiritual Family gathering around the Shrine, rather it is an Apostolic Family that carries and shares the graces of the Shrine wherever it goes, because, as the motto that brought them together during these days expresses, we are: “Missionary Family, Living Shrines for the world”.
The proposal was to celebrate and express gratitude for 25 years of history (including a party and birthday cake, of course!), but we did not remain in the past, rather we dreamed together about the future. We left the Congress with a very clear awareness of all the steps we want to take so that the Family Missions become stronger in the dioceses where they are already present and continue to grow and multiply in those places where there are hearts on fire for the vocation of serving as missionary families.
Romi and Pio Reitano, from Mendoza, commented: “The children were the main reason why we participated in the Congress and that shows that it was a real joy for them as well. They all went back home having formed new bonds, new friendships, new families”.
Fruits
As a result of the workshops and the exchanges offered by families, we discerned in prayer and in dialogue some new horizons of work based on the names of Schoenstatt heroes such as John Pozzobon, Sister M. Emilie Engel, Father Franz Reinisch, Jose Engling, and Father Esteban Uriburu. Among them, we stressed the importance that we want to give to the unity and national identity as Argentinean Family Missions; the value of integration and synergic work with the Pilgrim Mother Apostolate and the Branches of the Schoenstatt Family; and the commitment to frequent national encounters as ways to mutually strengthen and reinforce each other.
“We experienced a great ‘awareness’ of what the Family Missions represent for our Church, our Movement and our country. The words “love, family, friendship, union, communion, Family Missions” resound in our hearts. May this space continue to be a source of graces for our society and help us to be Living Shrines from where we offer our treasure of graces”, commented Ana and Osvaldo Marcozzi, from La Plata.
Origins
A very special moment was the visit and the testimonies of the founding couples of the Family Missions, who began this adventure 25 years ago in La Plata. They told how this missionary experience transformed their lives and those of their children because of the deep and lasting bonds that were formed while on mission. Each “family of life” that is formed during the mission with the biological and “adopted” children, became a family school, where they all learned to share, to dialogue, to help and value each other. They shared how, as the years went by, these bonds were maintained in daily life and became a very deep and familial friendship.
In the framework of their testimony regarding the founding years, they talked about how it had been difficult for them to find a place to go on mission, since back in 1999 no parish priest had much confidence in this new initiative of “family missions”. After several failed attempts and faced with the inability to find a place for the mission, they entrusted this intention to Father Esteban Uriburu, a Schoenstatt Father and international promoter of the Pilgrim Mother Apostolate, who had died a short time before, on October 12, 1998. He had a personal bond with these founding couples and certainly, with his missionary spirit, he would have loved to participate.
Shortly afterwards the news arrived: there was a parish priest who wanted to receive them in the town of Belgrano! From the beginning, they attributed the sponsorship of the MF to Father Esteban. Over the years this story had been lost, since the present generation was unaware of these facts, but now it has returned to our collective memory. Providentially, that Saturday, we were in the middle of the Congress, and it was October 12, and we realized that it was the 26th anniversary of Father Esteban’s departure!
It is a missionary vocation
In conclusion, something that can be emphasized from the whole Congress was not only the words or documents, but a profound experience that made us become attuned in an almost “spontaneous” way: the joy of being in a family sharing with an extraordinary ease this missionary vocation.
There is no doubt that this is a grace from God and that the Blessed Mother wants to shower many blessings through this initiative of family apostolate. It is a missionary vocation that has already borne fruit in 11 communities throughout the country and wants to bring the Blessed Mother to many places, not only because it carries the Pilgrim MTA, but also because it manifests a style of family life that spreads faith and values with the greatest normalcy and in a tremendously effective way.
Translation: Maribel Acaron