This is a great story coming out of France.
The moment a monstrance bearing the Blessed Sacrament was fixed high over an altar in a convent church in a remote French valley, a nun stepped forward to start the process of eucharistic adoration — one the sisters hope will continue day and night, week after week and year after year. Mother Marie Xavier McMonagle thus began the perpetual adoration of the “Tyburn Nuns,” an order of enclosed contemplative Benedictine nuns established to worship the “eucharistic heart of Jesus.”
In so doing, she also closed a day of ceremonies to install the order’s newest community, situated near Dijon, France. This community, the 12th to be established in less than a century, has eight members, each of whom will spend a minimum one hour a day in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes they will be assisted by lay Catholics.
A founding charism of the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre is the unceasing eucharistic adoration, which continues round-the-clock when the community is large enough for its members to physically and mentally sustain such prayer. At present there seems to be no shortage of women expressing an interest in such devotion because the opening of the convent Sept. 29 represents the latest expansion of a female religious order which — like the Nashville Dominicans in the U.S. — is growing rapidly while others decline.
It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? When you call for people to turn their lives completely over to Christ and make a radical commitment you’ll get interest. But when you water down the faith in the hopes that you’ll bring more people in, it just doesn’t work.
Thank God for women like these, making a radical commitment to Christ. Keep them in your prayers.
October 9, 2013 at 12:10 pm
If you ever travel to London, stop in on the Tyburn nuns– just a stone's throw from Marble Arch– they have a chapel filled with relics from the Catholic persecution in England (the executions being done at tyburn tree). It is really quite amazing.