GERMANY, Maria Fischer. “Paper streamers fluttered about the picture of Mary, two clowns provided the guard of honour and grinned mischievously down on the crowd – and next to the statue with the face of Fr Kentenich a blue and white dunce cap crowned the effect. Church and carnival! There is no fear in Mario Hiriart House in Schoenstatt about combining the two.” This was the start of a long and humorous article in the “Koblenzer Rhein-Zeitung” about Schoenstatt’s involvement in the Vallendar carnival procession, the carnival order presented to Mr Rainer M. Götter, a Brother of Mary, and the fact that fun and Schoenstatt definitely fit together.
Schoenstatt, a suburb of Vallendar, is situated in the Rhineland between the big epicentres of carnival: Mainz and Cologne. It is an area in which a state of emergency rules in the weeks before the start of Lent. Carnival is actually extremely Catholic, Janina Mogendorf explained on the website katholisch.de. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, every name means that the people really want to celebrate before Lent begins. The word “carnival” is taken from the Latin “carne vale”, which means “Good-bye meat”. This already indicates what the real meaning is.” Carnival is Catholic, we are told by the founder of the Cologne band Bläck Fööss: “Carnival is actually a Catholic phenomenon. It concerns the days before Lent, which plays a very different role for Catholics than in other confessions. You can see this in the fact that there is hardly any carnival to be seen in Protestant areas. The Rheinland is a region that has been particularly marked by the Catholic Church for hundreds of years. As a result the connection between faith and carnival is particularly prominent here. However, it is also because carnival is most strongly rooted in the population of the Rheinland. In the Rheinland – as I have as a protestant from Berlin have observed over a longer period – carnival is something like code for the attitude of people to life.”
And it is this attitude to life that is important, the article in the newspaper tells us as it quote Rainer M. Götter, a Brother of Mary, who said, “Human beings need humour. Just like faith, humour gives people optimism and a perspective, even if they have to cope with difficult situations in their lives.”
It was with a touch of Rheinland humour that in the mid-1990s he presented a Schoenstatt Carnival Order to the Vallendar Carnival organisers. It broke the ice between the two worlds of Schoenstatt and Vallendar and started a tradition.
The motto of the Schoenstatt troop: “Schoenstatt turned 100 – we thank Vallendar”
It was a very popular move that a troop from Schoenstatt joined the Vallendar Carnival procession for the second time – after the premier in the Jubilee Year 2014. Referring to it, their motto this time was “Schoenstatt turned 100 – we thank Vallendar”. A happy, humorous thanks to the town of Vallendar that supported the preparations and implementation of Schoenstatt’s jubilee with such generosity.
Original: German. Translation: Mary Cole, Manchester, England
