Fr. Richard Henkes, S.A.C., A Picture of His Life A Picture of His Life | Page 26

Schönstatt. This was the school of the Pallottines in 1912. The
community was desperately in need of vocations for its mission in
Cameroon, where it had been operating since 1890, and in Australia,
where a mission had been undertaken in 1901 among the Aborig-
ines. The Missions House in Limburg, founded in 1892, could not
perform all these tasks. And so, the community had opened a school
in Ehrenbreitstein in 1896 to lead young men to graduate from high
school. In 1901 the so-called Old House in the valley of Schönstatt
near Vallendar was added. It was beside the two mighty towers, part
of the miserable rest of a medieval abbey. The cemetery chapel was
still standing. The enthusiasm of the turn from the nineteenth century
to the twentieth century was so great that soon the old house was in
ruins, and a new study house was built on the slope above it.
Fr. Henkes was among the first to be housed there in Septem-
ber 1912. What might have happened in the boy? On the one hand,
large new buildings were familiar to him. He had experienced the
construction of the parish church in Meudt. His father was a stone-
mason. He often brought food to the construction sites. And how he
listened intently, when his father told of the construction huts for the
Cathedral in Cologne, where he worked temporarily. On the other
hand, Richard had had to leave the familiar homeland, his family, his
playmates, the fields of the village, the Kapellenweg (Chapel path) to
Goldhausen, the church route to Meudt. It was good that Josef Fried-
rich had moved to the student house with him. It meant that he knew
at least one face among his 38 classmates. Nevertheless, the word and
the pain of “homesickness” would never leave him, whether in Vallen-
dar or Limburg, in Alpen or Frankenstein, Strandorf or Dachau.
His homesickness was lessened by classmates like Josef Engling,
Heinrich Schulte, and Josef Hagel, lessened by the friends he made
like Hans Wormer and Karl Kubisch, the Upper Silesian, whom he
takes with his family to Ruppach during the holidays. Letters often
went back and forth. Soon the stress of school, with its strictly regu-
lated agenda and the short leisure time in the “Marian congregation,”
also left little time for homesickness. Not least, although his parents
had told him that he could come home at any time, Richard wanted
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