By Andy - 26 May, 2013
The National Apostolate of Adoration has reacted with delight to the announcement that Pope Francis will next Sunday, 2nd June 2013, take part in a period of Eucharistic Adoration, which will be televised live throughout the world at 4.00pm.
The Pope has invited every parish in the world to have a time of Eucharistic Devotion on the same day, feast of the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.
John Howard from the National Apostolate of Adoration said that from the time of Pope John Paul II, there has been great support from popes for Eucharistic Adoration. “Scarcely a month went by when the pope did not mention the power of prayer before the Blessed Eucharist,” he told told CatholicIreland, but said Mr Howard, this initiative of inviting the faithful to pray before the Eucharist with the pope was a “thrilling” development.
According to the National Co-Ordinator in Ireland and England, Eucharistic Adoration is on the rise all the time. “A few years ago there were a few hundred centres of adoration in Ireland. Today there are more than 2,000,” said Mr Howard.
The adoration is happening in parish churches, convents and monasteries.
In 2000 there were only two diocesan Adoration Committees, but with the support of the bishops, today nineteen of the twenty -six diocese have their own committees. Parishes are invited to set up a “viable weekly adoration programme”. “This means there should be three to four people doing adoration each hour,” Mr Howard explains.
Such has been the effect and success of the movement in Ireland, that members of the National Apostolate of Adoration were invited to the diocese of Arundel and Brighton last year to set up a diocesan Adoration Committee there, and this is now being replicated in other English dioceses.
Mr Howard is based in Meath where there are 100 centres of adoration, including one in each of its sixty nine parishes. He has been doing Eucharistic Adoration himself for twenty six years.
“I try to do it every day for twenty minutes to an hour,” he told CatholicIreland. In his parish, St Mary’s in Navan, there is Eucharistic Adoration seven days a week, 24 hours a day and he sees the blessings.
“You see so many great graces – family disputes are resolved, young people return to the faith, economic problems are overcome.”
He compares Eucharistic Adoration to sunbathing. “When you sit in the sun, you don’t notice what’s happening, but then you get a tan. The Eucharist has a transforming effect on us. It is a channel through which good things happen and go out to our community to our family and friends,” he says.
In Navan about 400 to 500 people do adoration each week. Nationally Mr Howard estimates that there are at least ten thousand praying each week.
Asked about security issues having a chapel or church open all night, he said that they have only had one incident where a person came in “ranting and raving” after someone close to them had died. “One of the adorers came out with him and went back to his home to pray with the family.”
Afterwards the man himself began to do adoration.
Another man from the town who had not been in a church for 26 years, came to collect his wife from adoration one night. After being inside the chapel, he told his wife “We’re going nowhere, I want to got to Confession.” He now does adoration each night.
by Susan ‘Gately
