Mechernich – Sister Lidwina gave a testimony of faith for the founding of the Communio in Christo in Mechernich and for its founder, Mother Marie Therese, as the speaker of an impulse evening in the house chapel in the Bruchgasse. Afterwards, Father Patrick Mwanguhya (35) from Uganda celebrated Holy Mass with the audience from the community and from outside.

Sister Lidwina spoke about the "Actualisation of the Life of Jesus in the Life of Mother Marie Therese". By way of introduction, she showed her listeners a film by the filmmaker Oskar Schunck from Frankfurt, including documentary footage from the day of the founding of the Communio in Christo on 8 December 1984.

Officially, it was the handing over of the then "Unio Centre" to Mother Marie Therese, but the actual act of founding had already taken place in the early morning in camera because of the objection of Bishop Klaus Hemmerle.

Sister Lidwina: "After a night spent awake and suffering, Mother Marie Therese made the decision at 5 o'clock in the morning: "I am founding". She refrained from founding within a public Eucharistic celebration in order not to cause a fuss and to protect the Church."

"Mother Marie Therese always followed God's will against all reservations and contradictions, she could not do otherwise because she was urged to do so by the Holy Spirit," said the speaker, who sees herself as an eyewitness of Mother Marie Therese's life and work.

Prophecies fulfilled

According to Sister Lidwina, this evening was about "witnessing to the holiness of her life and to the mission she had received from God". Like John the Baptist, who is celebrated these days, the foundress from Mechernich was "the mouth of God" in a figurative sense, someone with prophetic abilities. Her life and her mystical experiences were "encounters with the Redeemer". Much of what she saw coming in the eighties is happening today.

Her brother Joannes Linssen described his Sister Josephine Theresia, born in 1927 in Oud-Valkenburg, the Netherlands, as an "unaffected child with an open heart": "At the same time, she could weep bitterly when she encountered a cross."

Sister Lidwina told her listeners how she came to her mother and the Mechernich community, then called "Unio", in 1982 out of her own "serious personal crisis" and how she found understanding, home and help there against all her own scepticism and rejection.

The thoroughly rebellious young woman who moved into the Mechernich Motherhouse together with Sister Dorothea in 1983 ("We'll be celebrating 40 years in residence in 2023!") is certain: "Mother Marie Therese had what you call soul vision, she could see into me like into an open book."

German Christians would have greater difficulties in understanding or accepting Mother Marie Therese's mystical experiences of God than, for example, Polish, Indian or African Catholics, among whom the Mechernich founder of the Ordo Communionis in Christo has a considerable number of followers and members.

"Sick people are my family"

The speaker told of the first aid shipments to and a visit in 1988 at the invitation of two Polish bishops in pre-democratic Poland, where Mother Marie Therese had said: "I came to Poland because I love the people there, but even more because I love God."

Sister Lidwina also did not spare her special relationship with the sick and suffering ("They are my family"), describing the nature and severity of their wounding and pain. On the feast of St Joseph in 1994, three weeks before her death, an outwardly radiant Mother Marie Therese had received her friends and members at the sickbed. None of them could imagine that God would call her home three weeks later, on 11 April 1994.

In her last prayer, written by Mother Marie Therese on 7 April, 3 days before her death, she describes the minute of death. A central statement in this prayer is: "In love, the certainty of being made for life and for heaven is fulfilled."

pp/Agentur ProfiPress