Fr. Richard Henkes, S.A.C., A Picture of His Life A Picture of His Life | Page 24

have sought a leader who guides me on the path of my heart quest, but
I have not found it.” This distance remained in Dachau as well.
Still, the young Pallottine did not sink into discouragement. He
was honest with himself. He wrote: “I have really pondered all my
life so far and always sought a balance between ideal and life and
never found it.” He fought his way through. He wanted to “listen to
God’s voice, to identify with his work.” He then began, again, to gain
strength and, in spite of everything, was ordained in 1925.
That year, Therese was canonized in Lisieux. The young Carmelite
had conquered a place in the hearts of many, even though her diary
“The Story of a Soul” had appeared in sanitized form on the market.
However, she became the great saint of the youth of the 1920s, to
whom her spirituality and her search for God spoke. Not least - and
this also makes her interesting for Pallottine circles - she is a patron
of the missions. We do not know what Richard Henkes read from and
about her or how much he was consoled by her during his supposed
God-deprivation. We only know that he put her image and a saying of
hers onto his Ordination card: “O how I love her, the Mother of God!
If I had become a priest, how enthusiastically I would have spoken of
her.” The picture shows Theresa of Lisieux before Mary with the boy
Jesus hovering over St. Peter’s in Rome on a cloud.
The Ordination card made it clear that the Catholic Church,
Mary, and also Therese certainly meant much to the new priest, with
varying degrees of importance. Therese’s sentence underscored the
special position of Mary. This is not surprising; the Mother of God
may have played a role in the piety of his family home. She played a
dominant role in his student days in Schönstatt. And here lies the
wonder: while the common memorial picture of his class shows the
image of Schönstatt, Richard Henkes chose a very different image
for his personal one. As much as he had accepted the goodness of the
piety of his youth, so much Marian spirituality had shaped his life, he
was no longer defined by a picture. Presumably his “dark” experiences
gave him a great breadth in piety and pastoral care. How deep his
Marian spirituality is shown by another text of the Ordination card.
“In the Holy Year of 1925, God anointed me as a priest and led me to
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