Student chaplaincy
Student chaplaincy and Benedictine hospitality
With the opening of the student residence in Münzgrabenstraße, the team from the Haus der Begegnung took over the pastoral care of the students living there.
For us, student chaplaincy means inviting students to experience faith in a lively community, to reflect on it with intellectual honesty and to deepen it by experiencing Benedictine spirituality and lifestyle in order to find an authentic and credible Christianity.
With services, meditation and reflection programmes, we want to offer opportunities to practise and experience Benedictine spirituality and to experience and deepen it. In this way, we want to help individuals and communities to discover their faith and express it in a language that is understandable in today's world.
Students are also given the opportunity to develop their own life skills beyond their studies and to strengthen their responsibility towards the world and all fellow human beings.
With this in mind, it is very important to us to offer spaces for exchange and belonging: Spaces for exchange, discussion and reflection that translate the heritage of the Holy Scriptures and the Benedictine tradition into our modern way of thinking and living, contributing to individual decision-making and personal faith. Encounters with art, literature, politics and other religions and denominations should help to discover the spiritual in contemporary culture and enable critical dialogue.
Spaces for belonging and interpersonal encounters serve as a counterbalance to the often lamented confusion, lack of commitment and anonymity of everyday university life. This is served not least by the openly accessible rooms: cafeteria with newspapers and magazines, garden and study room, which make the Haus der Begegnung an inviting, relaxing oasis in the middle of the vibrant university quarter
St Benedict writes in the 53rd chapter of his Rule: "All strangers who come should be welcomed like Christ, for he will say: 'I was a stranger and you welcomed me'." (RB 53,1)
In its 1500-year tradition, Benedictine hospitality has taken different forms, but it has always been based on the principle of welcoming people without discrimination or prejudice, following the example of Christ. The student residence is a special form of this hospitality that invites people to encounter Christ.
"Everywhere God is present, we believe, and the eyes of the Lord look on the good and the bad in every place." (RB 19:1)
The centre of this encounter is the chapel where the Eucharist is celebrated. The chapel is intended to be a place of silence when the noise of everyday life becomes too much, but also as a place of prayer and special closeness to God: giving God space and time not only in special or difficult times, but also in everyday life.
"Listen, my son, to the instruction of the Master, incline the ear of your heart, willingly accept the promise of the benevolent Father and fulfil it by deed!" (RB Prol, 1)
These words, which our Holy Father Benedict placed at the beginning of his Rule, are both an invitation and a task for students. We invite you to free the hearing of the heart from the worries, problems and countless everyday things that block and clog this hearing; to sharpen it in order to perceive God's voice all the more attentively; to find a hearing through common prayer.
