One of Fr. Kentenich’s great wishes was that the Schoenstatt Movement, founded a hundred years ago in an unknown valley leading down to the Rhine in Germany, should be present in the heart of the universal Church in Rome. In 1965 the leading representatives of the International Schoenstatt Movement promised their founder that they would build an international center in Rome. It took over forty years before this promise could be realized when the International Schoenstatt Center in Belmonte, Rome, was built. Fr. Kentenich’s expectations, for the MATRI ECCLESIAE Shrine and Belmonte as a whole, found expression in the programmatic talks of this book. This bookcontains three of Father Kentenich’s main conferences; two of them have been translated for the first time to English. They offer a good opportunity to learn what the International Center of Belmonte means to Schoenstatt and the Church, and they offer a broad look of the vision Father Kentenich had of the renewed Church. 10
