Perpetual adoration is a growing Catholic trend. A Holy Year event is scheduled for the weekend
HIALEAH, Fla. (AP) — Twice a week, Luisa Arguello and her husband spend from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. praying in the perpetual adoration chapel at St. Benedict Catholic Church, tucked on a quiet palm-fringed residential street in the Miami suburb of Hialeah.
“Your body clock gets used to it. You feel that the Lord embraces you, and everything changes,” said Arguello, who has been the chapel’s coordinator since it opened in 2019. “I don’t feel the same as when I started. Adoration takes you to the presence of the Lord.”
In hundreds of parishes across the United States and elsewhere, growing numbers of Catholics are taking shifts before the Blessed Sacrament — which they believe is the presence of Christ, not just a symbol — on view in dedicated chapels 24/7. Thousands more churches have regular adoration hours or days.
The Vatican is marking a special Holy Year event Friday into Saturday about the practice — “24 hours for the Lord” — and churches around the world will offer continuous adoration then, including Miami’s iconic “La Ermita” sanctuary. In the United States last summer, thousands of pilgrims walked through multiple states to gather at the National Eucharistic Congress, the first such event in more than 80 years.
For many St. Benedict parishioners, adoration is already a practice as standard as going to Mass — except that it feels quieter and more personal.
“If you don’t give up 15 minutes a day to foster this friendship with the Lord, how are you going to spend eternity in heaven with him?” said Alfredo Janson.
Every day from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. before work as a communications engineer, Janson goes to the tiny chapel. Ten chairs face a sunburst-shaped monstrance — the vessel where an unusually large consecrated host is displayed.
He calls the orchid-adorned chapel “the factory of miracles” — like the healing of his brother in Nicaragua from a severe case of COVID-19, one of the many causes he’s prayed for.
There are 400 adorers like Janson at the mostly Cuban American, working-class parish, who commit to at least one hour a week and often act as substitutes if someone can’t make their hour. Church law forbids leaving the Blessed Sacrament unattended in the monstrance.
Their commitment allows the chapel to be open for those who might have just a few minutes to stop before or after school, work or worship services. Like most, it’s open to anyone except from midnight to 6 a.m., where only registered adorers can enter for security reasons. Plans to expand it are in the works.
“Without the whole community, this wouldn’t be possible,” Janson said.
The Rev. Yonhatan Londoño said the chapel is “an oasis” for many, a place where happy or sad tears can fall freely. But he often reminds his flock that prayer is not an individual endeavor.
“This is the point of the chapel, that people may enter into communion,” said Londoño. In the two years he’s been the parish priest, he has ditched the cassock he sometimes wore for a black guayabera shirt with the clerical collar, also in the spirit of the church meeting people where they are.
His predecessor at St. Benedict started the perpetual adoration chapel. When churches were shuttered during the COVID-19 lockdown, he took the monstrance through the neighborhood streets on the back of a pickup truck.
That’s in line with centuries of tradition – during the 16th century plague in Milan, Italy, St. Charles Borromeo exposed the host on altars outside so people could find comfort in the presence, said Timothy O’Malley, academic director of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Liturgy.
The practice of adoration traces back to the early church. It blossomed in the Middle Ages after the church instituted the feast of Corpus Christi — Body of Christ in Latin — the celebration of the belief that when bread and wine are consecrated during the eucharistic sacrament, Christ becomes truly present in them.
Major processions with the Blessed Sacrament, and often far-from-sober citywide festivities, are still celebrated today on that solemnity, which falls in late spring, especially in Latin America and Spain. Spain also has a century-old tradition of overnight adoration, said Fermín Labarga, church history professor at University of Navarra.
As a youth in his native Argentina, Pope Francis went to nighttime adoration with his brother and he instituted the call for the “24 hours” Lenten practice early in his papacy. Late in his, St. John Paul II wrote of the importance of adoration, lamenting that in some regions it was abandoned.
“The worship of the Eucharist outside of the Mass is of inestimable value for the life of the Church,” his 2003 encyclical read. “It is pleasant to spend time with him (Christ) … to feel the infinite love present in his heart.”
It’s that “affective encounter with Christ” outside of the ritual requirements of worship that attracts growing numbers of people and especially youth like today’s Notre Dame students, said O’Malley.
“They have a lot of anxiety and here they have an object – of course, I would say a person – but that they can focus all their attention toward, who is there for them to be present to in silence, tech-free,” he said. “Some just sit and talk … like they’re with a friend.”
For Miami-area pastor Rev. Alejandro Rodríguez Artola, that’s the appeal that distinguishes adoration from Mass, which virtually all adorers also attend.
“Mass has activities, Mass has other families, a social element,” said Rodríguez, whose last three parishes all had adoration chapels. “People like the tranquility and intimacy of feeling he’s speaking to nobody else but them.”
When 15 years ago he was assigned to pastor a shrinking congregation whose church had been gutted by fire, he decided to include a chapel in the rebuilding – and said people still text him today to thank him, saying as many as 20 people are often crammed in it.
Today he leads St. Thomas the Apostle in a suburb of Miami, which had perpetual adoration for more than two decades and still hosts it for about 12 hours each weekday. That allows many families with children in St. Thomas’ school to pop in before classes or after sports practice, along with commuters.
“I think it’s the anchor,” Rodríguez said of the adoration chapel. “A church building spends most of the week empty, but this doesn’t.”
On a recent early afternoon at St. Benedict’s chapel, some faithful prayed the rosary while others read Scriptures or knelt in silent recollection.
“I just feel like looking at him, and that he is the one talking to me,” said Lastenia Vivas, who carries one of the midnight-to-1 a.m. shifts. “Sometimes one arrives tired, but the peace that you feel here is unique.”
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