Behind the Schoenstatt Fathers’ house in Austin, a trail runs down through the woods and back up again. Five places along it have been set aside, one each for an Austrian priest executed for refusing an oath, a Brazilian deacon who walked, the poor man of Assisi, a Carmelite who died at twenty-four, and the carpenter this house is named for.
At each one there is a sign with a name and something to pray for, an image to stand in front of, and a prayer on a board off to the side. This page holds the rest: who these five were, and why they are here.
It is meant to be walked slowly, and it is not meant to be finished. One station is a whole visit.
Before you come
The trail is behind the house, and anyone is welcome on it. It is not a public park, so it keeps hours:
- Sunday — 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
- Monday to Saturday — 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Where — 225 Addie Roy Rd, Austin, TX 78746. Directions
- St. Joseph — for work
- Franz Reinisch — for courage
- João Pozzobon — for family unity
- St. Francis — for peace
- St. Thérèse of Lisieux — for trust
Why the saints?
The obvious objection comes first: why not go straight to God?
It is a fair question, and the answer is not that the saints are a shortcut or a formality. It is that God did not make a world in which anyone arrives alone. We are one body, Paul says, and that does not stop being true when somebody dies. The people who are already home are more themselves than they have ever been, not less — and they are still ours.
How we hold that matters. It is possible to reduce a saint to a teaching aid: a picture on a wall to remind you of something, a means to an end. Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca’s objection to that is below, and it is the right one — nobody talks that way about someone they love.
So these five are not examples set up along a path for you to measure yourself against. That is worth saying plainly, because a trail of saints could very easily become exactly that, and then walking it would leave you further behind than when you started. Not one of them got where they are by trying harder than you are trying. Every one of them was loved first and answered afterwards. Holiness, as he puts it, “doesn’t start with your ‘will power’, with your obsession with sin” — it starts when you find out you are loved, and gratitude does the rest.
One last thing, and it is why they are on a trail together rather than in five separate places. Saints come in groups. Augustine had Ambrose. Clare had Francis. Thérèse had her whole family. Holiness turns out to be contagious — and you are not standing outside the group looking in. You are walking through the middle of it.
This is central so as not to fall into deformations in the life of faith. A priest, in responding to the classic phrase “you worship the saints”, says, ‘no, you can only worship God’ (true), the statues of the saints are only “reminders” of people we love (half true). Communion of saints is not a ‘reminder’, it is not understanding the relationship with the saints (and with humanity) as mere means to an end. Imagine saying to a person, for example, to the Blessed Mother: “I have an image of you as a reminder, a help simply, to then get to God”. Try saying that to your girlfriend, to your boyfriend, to your mother. Why would you say that to the saints? That is not the language of love, it is a utilitarian language and it is not what the Church says: “It is not merely by the title of example that we cherish the memory of those in heaven; we seek, rather, that by this devotion to the exercise of fraternal charity the union of the whole Church in the Spirit may be strengthened. Exactly as Christian communion among our fellow pilgrims brings us closer to Christ, so our communion with the saints joins us to Christ, from whom as from its fountain and head issues all grace, and the life of the People of God itself” (Catechism, n 957).
— Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca, from Why the saints?
St. Joseph
for work
We do not have one word from Joseph. Not a line of dialogue in any gospel. What we have instead is what he did: he took Mary into his home when the respectable course was to send her away quietly, he got up in the night and left the country to keep a child safe, and then for thirty years, nothing — no miracles, no preaching, only a workshop in a small town and a boy learning a trade from him.
That silence is the point, and it is why this station is about work. Most of a life looks like Joseph’s stretch in Nazareth: unremarkable, unrecorded, and due again tomorrow. It is very easy to believe that the real thing is happening somewhere else and that your own Tuesday is the part that does not count. Joseph is the answer to that. The Son of God learned to hold a chisel from a man whose entire recorded output is a series of quiet decisions taken in the dark.
Nothing in his story suggests it was easy, or that he understood it while it was happening. He was asked to take on a situation he had not planned for and could not have explained to his neighbours, and he did it without ever being shown how it would turn out.
Pray here for your work — the particular work you will go back to tomorrow, whatever it is, and whether or not anybody notices it. Ask Joseph for what he had: the patience to do it well, the steadiness to do it again, and the freedom from needing it to be seen.
And as Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca notes below, this house is his.
The Church has long looked to Saint Joseph as the patron and model of workers. His work as a carpenter was not simply a means of providing for Jesus and Mary; it was an expression of his love and faithful service. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote, “Work was the daily expression of love in the life of the Family of Nazareth.” This is why we turn to Saint Joseph in our own work, asking him to teach us to work with love, diligence, and faith, and to provide faithfully for our families. It is especially meaningful for us that the house where we live, the house of the Schoenstatt Fathers, is dedicated to Saint Joseph.
— Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca. The quotation is from St. John Paul II, Redemptoris Custos (1989), §22.
The prayer at this station
Saint Joseph, worker and provider,
guide my hands,
bless my work,
and teach me to do it
with love and faithfulness.
Provide for my family
and keep me close to Jesus.Amen.
adapted from the prayer attributed to St. Pius X
Franz Reinisch
Servant of God · for courage
Franz Reinisch spent the last months of his life in a cell, alone, with a decision he had already made and a great deal of time in which to doubt it.
That is the part worth holding on to. The summary of his life — an Austrian priest who refused to swear loyalty to Hitler and was executed for it — makes it sound like a single brave moment. It was not a moment. It was months of silence, with no congregation, no one watching, nobody to be brave in front of. Whatever held him there held him in private.
It is tempting to make a man like this into a monument, and monuments are not much use to the person standing at the foot of them. What Reinisch actually leaves us is smaller and far more usable: a way of getting through a day whose end you cannot see. He did not have clarity. He had a next step, and someone he trusted to show him the one after that.
He prayed Newman’s Lead, Kindly Light every day in prison, which is why it is the prayer on the board here. Its best-known line asks for less rather than more: I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.
So pray here for courage, but notice what kind. Not the courage that feels like strength or looks like certainty. From the inside, Reinisch’s courage would have felt a great deal like fear that kept going anyway. If you are carrying something whose end you cannot see, this is the station for it. Ask only for the next step. He would tell you that is enough.
Franz Reinisch was an Austrian Pallottine priest and a member of the Schoenstatt Movement who, in 1942, refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler because he believed he could not act against his conscience as a Christian and priest. He knew that his refusal could cost him his life; he was arrested, sentenced to death, and on August 21, 1942, was guillotined at Brandenburg-Görden. In prison, Reinisch wrote words that reveal the faith and trust that sustained him: “Perfect love casts out fear! For God is love and cannot be surpassed in generosity. He sends as much suffering as one is capable of mastering at the moment. Through this, faith, patience, and courage grow, enabling one to accept and fulfill even greater tasks.” Shortly before his death, he also wrote: “Infinite Love, let me love You again. Let me revolve only around You. More love, love, love.” During his imprisonment, Reinisch prayed daily with Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Lead, Kindly Light, finding consolation in its prayer of surrender. His life became a witness to the trust he placed in God: he did not need to see the whole path, only to remain faithful to God one step at a time.
— Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca
The prayer at this station
Kindly Light, lead me
through the darkness that surrounds me.
Lead me on.The night is dark,
and I am far from home.
Lead me on.Guide my steps;
I do not need to see the road ahead
or know what lies beyond.Just show me the next step.
That is enough for me.
after John Henry Newman, Lead, Kindly Light
João Pozzobon
Venerable · for family unity
João Pozzobon was a deacon with a small shop, a wife and children, and a route. For thirty-five years he walked the streets of Santa Maria in southern Brazil carrying a picture of Our Lady from house to house — a hundred and forty thousand kilometres of walking, most of it after a day’s work, almost all of it seen by nobody except the families who opened their doors. He never missed a day. He died on one of those walks, on his way to Mass in a heavy fog, hit by a truck whose driver did not see him.
He is on this trail because of what that adds up to. Not one great act but the same ordinary act repeated long past the point where anyone was counting. He was not a priest. He founded no order and wrote no book. He got up and went out, and then did it again the next day, and what he started is now in more than a hundred countries.
What is easy to miss — and what Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca’s text below gets exactly right — is that he did not do it alone, or over his family’s heads. When he sensed that more was being asked of him, he sat his wife and children down at the table and asked their permission. They gave it, and then gave far more than permission: his wife baked the bread, his daughter taught in the school, his older children took over in the shop so that he could go.
Pray here for your family — the one you actually have, with its particular strains and its particular history. Pozzobon’s mission did not happen despite his household. It came out of it. Whatever God is asking of you, the people you live with are rarely the obstacle to it. Usually they are where it starts.
When João Pozzobon felt that God was calling him to increase his missionary activity, he gathered his children and his wife together around the table at home. He asked his children and his wife: “I feel that the Blessed Mother wants more from me. Are you in agreement with this?” All of his children remember that day, and they all said yes. And they did not simply say yes—they began to support the Campaign. The older children began helping in the family store so that João could go out more often on his missions. His wife not only gave him her permission; she blessed him.
João always said that she would bless him before he went out on mission. When he prepared meals for the poor, his wife made the bread. When he established two schools for the poor, his first teacher was his daughter. The Rosary Campaign was truly born from the heart of a family.
— Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca, adapted from an interview with Fr. Víctor Posseti, postulator of João Pozzobon’s cause, for Schoenstatt Chile
The prayer at this station
Jesus and Mary,
come into our home
and keep our family united in Your love.
Heal what divides us,
strengthen what binds us,
and keep our hearts close to You
and to one another.Amen.
St. Francis
for peace
Everyone knows the birdbath Francis, and the birdbath is not wrong, only small. The man it comes from gave away a fortune, kissed a leper, walked into a sultan’s camp in the middle of a crusade in order to talk rather than fight, and spent the end of his life half-blind and in constant pain, composing a song about the sun.
That song is why he has a station on this trail. In the Canticle of the Creatures Francis does not admire nature; he addresses it as family — Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Sister Water, our Sister Mother Earth. He is not being decorative. He means that everything alive has the same Father, and that this makes the wren and the live oak and the person walking past them relatives rather than resources. Eight hundred years later Pope Francis took that song’s opening words for the title of Laudato Si’ and built an encyclical on its argument: that how we treat the earth and how we treat each other are one question and not two.
You are standing in the middle of the answer. This ground, these woods, the deer that came through before you did — Francis would have known what to call them.
His greeting, the one on the board, is the one he believed God gave him: May the Lord give you peace. It is worth noticing what it is not. It is not advice, and it is not an instruction. It is a prayer, said over somebody. He used it on everyone he met, and once, famously, on a flock of birds.
So pray here for peace, and then consider giving it away rather than only asking for it. Say his line, silently, over the next person who comes to mind — the one you are not at peace with will do. That is what he did with it.
Francis made a further remark about the primitive life, one that seems almost trivial at first glance: God had revealed to him a greeting: “May the Lord give you peace.” We even have a physical example of Francis using it. He put it on parchment for Brother Leo in a short autograph letter of blessing written during his final illness. He used it when he greeted the birds of Bevagna before his famous “sermon to the birds.” This phrase was not a command or a didactic instruction; it was a prayer.
— Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca, from Augustine Thompson OP, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Cornell University Press, 2012)
The prayer at this station
May the Lord give you peace.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
for trust
Thérèse Martin entered Carmel at fifteen, died of tuberculosis at twenty-four, and spent the last eighteen months of her life unable to feel that heaven was there at all. She wrote about it plainly, without dressing it up. She said it was as though a wall had gone up as far as the sky.
That is not the part of her that reaches the holy cards, and it is the part that makes her worth having on this trail. She did not lose her faith in that darkness. She simply stopped receiving anything back from it, kept going anyway, and refused to pretend otherwise.
What she had found before then is what she is known for. She had wanted to be a great saint, and she had noticed, honestly, that she was not one and was not going to become one by trying harder. So she stopped climbing. She decided that being small was not a defect to be repaired before God would have her — it was the actual qualification. She called it the little way, and it is much smaller than it sounds. It is not a shortcut to holiness. It is the decision to come to God as the person you really are today, with the day you really had, and to expect to be received.
Pray here for trust. Not the kind that has run out of questions; Thérèse had more of those at the end than at the beginning. The kind she had: the sort that keeps walking in the dark because of who is holding the other hand, and that asks for more than it deserves on the grounds that the one being asked is generous.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux shows us how her trust completely dismantles that mentality we Catholics can sometimes have—that we can earn our way to heaven through our own merits. Through her Little Way, she shows us a total confidence in the mercy of God: the confidence that God, in His generosity, will “bestow on them far more than their merits.” And so Thérèse entrusts herself to this “far-more” promised by God’s grace: “I know well that I shall never be worthy of what I am hoping for; but I put my hand out like a begging child, and I know that You will grant me so much more than I ask, because You are so good.” In his reflection on Thérèse, Hans Urs von Balthasar describes the reverse side of Thérèse as the “thief of heaven.” Previously it was Thérèse who stole heaven; now it is God, the great eagle, who steals her and carries His booty off to heaven. Thérèse herself says: “I see Him from afar and take care not to shout, ‘There goes the thief!’ On the contrary. I call to Him, ‘This way! This way!'”
— Fr. Gonzalo Villaseca. The “thief of heaven” is from Hans Urs von Balthasar, Thérèse of Lisieux: The Story of a Mission (1953).
The prayer at this station
O my Jesus,
I desire to love You
and to make You loved.
I see my helplessness,
yet I ask with confidence,
for Your mercy is infinite.
Come and take possession of my soul.Amen.