NEWS FEATURE: Catholics signing on for round-the-clock prayer

c. 1999 Religion News Service NEWARK, N.J. _ With the bells of St. Lucy’s Church chiming the noon hour, Barbara Ombaldo walked hurriedly from the marble sanctuary to the lobby and added her name to a ledger already filled with signatures. She joined two other women in silent prayer, kneeling before a shining monstrance in […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEWARK, N.J. _ With the bells of St. Lucy’s Church chiming the noon hour, Barbara Ombaldo walked hurriedly from the marble sanctuary to the lobby and added her name to a ledger already filled with signatures.

She joined two other women in silent prayer, kneeling before a shining monstrance in front of a stained-glass Jesus in the Chapel of Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration.


Day in and day out for more than a year, Ombaldo and other St. Lucy’s parishioners have been at the church around the clock as an organized sign of devotion to God, offering prayers for everything from sick friends to world peace.

“It’s the most beautiful feeling when you’re sitting here,” said Ombaldo. “You know God is listening to your prayers, and that hour goes by really quickly.”

The 24-hour adoration, a grass-roots movement organized and staffed largely by lay people, is a growing trend in American Roman Catholic churches. Experts describe it as a traditionalist backlash against the emphasis on communal worship ushered in by the Second Vatican Council.

Marita Entena, who has filled two one-hour slots each week at the chapel for more than six months, said devotion to the Blessed Sacrament _ the round host that Catholic teaching views as containing the real presence of Jesus Christ _ reminded her of the more traditional church of her youth in the Philippines.

“They posted a flier on the bulletin board asking, `Can you spend an hour with Me?’ That question touched my heart,” said Entena, whose 13-year-old son Joseph often joins her on the chapel visits. “I said, `Wow. I owe something to God.”’

In a similar act of devotion, Entena, who works as a hospital pharmacist’s assistant, attends a night vigil at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Bloomfield that lasts from 9 p.m. on the first Friday of the month to 7 a.m. the next day.

Thirty-four years after the conclusion of Vatican II, such individual expressions of devotion _ including weekly confession and novenas _ are considered passe by some liberal Catholics.


Sister Ann Rehrauer, associate director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for the Liturgy, however, said the growing popularity of perpetual adoration is a sign some people yearn for a closer relationship with Christ.

“While trying to emphasize the one, we inadvertently de-emphasized the other,” she conceded. “Now we are seeing an increase in devotional expressions.”

In 1981, Pope John Paul II called on all parishes to establish perpetual adoration, and in recent years the practice has begun to catch on. A Web site constructed by the Missionaries of the Blessed Sacrament in Plattsburgh, N.Y., lists 1,000 churches across the nation that host the round-the-clock prayers. Linda Bracy, one of the organization’s founders, said the number has doubled in the past decade.

“Heaven clearly wants perpetual adoration,” said Bracy. “In these times of great confusion and darkness, Jesus is ministering directly to his people. We have a shortage of vocations and many difficulties in the church, but he is ministering to his people as never before.”

Some liberal Catholics are troubled by the traditionalist tones that seem to drive the devotion, which requires an organized effort to cover 168 hourlong shifts weekly for an indefinite period.

“You don’t want it to be a revisionist movement,” Rehrauer said. “At its best, adoration is supposed to lead to participation.”


Some involved in the Newark effort agreed they are dissatisfied with the lack of devotion they see in the church.

“I know the church sanctioned Vatican II, but I don’t particularly like the changes,” said Pete Padian, who is in the chapel from midnight to 3 a.m. every Sunday. “There are some very liberal people in our church who want to have a liberal religion, almost like a Protestant religion.”

St. Lucy’s parish tends to be somewhat traditional. Founded by Italian immigrants, its pristine shrine to St. Gerard is lit with hundreds of candles. The sanctuary still holds an altar rail _ the majority of parishes have dispensed with it _ and parishioners often receive communion there on their knees.

The 236 weekly regulars who visit the Newark chapel _ they are joined by at least 100 visitors a month _ are a diverse group. There are Italians who recall the parish’s peak years in the 1950s, when Sunday services drew thousands of worshippers, and Latinos who are more representative of the current neighborhood demographics. Sunday Mass draws about 900 people.

Isabella Rodriguez, who visits the chapel on Wednesdays, grew up in a family of 11 in the high-rise housing projects that once cast a shadow on the church but have since been torn down. She said the church helped her family find its way out of poverty. Her son attended the church grammar school and will be married in the church in November.

“For me, this adoration was a way of feeling closer to God and trying to be a better person,” Rodriguez said. “God has always been there for me. I’ve had some rough times, but God has helped me live through them.”


Monsignor Joseph Granato, who has been assigned to St. Lucy’s since 1955, said that since instituting perpetual adoration at his church, more people are coming to confession and the number of people attending daily Mass has gone up from roughly 50 to 75 worshippers.

“People talk about evangelization and the millennium,” he said. “You want a spiritual renewal? This is the answer.”

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Granato conceded that when the idea of holding a round-the-clock adoration was proposed in January 1998 by two parishioners, he had concerns about safety and logistics, including the need for a chapel where the silent meditation wouldn’t be disturbed by the ordinary life of the church.

That was solved when volunteers cleaned up an old entrance piled high with junk and turned it into the stained-glass chapel. The adoration began May 27, 1998.

After some research, Granato _ who has trained two fierce watchdogs as the neighborhood surrounding St. Lucy’s worsened over the years _ found that even churches in high-crime areas haven’t reported problems with round-the-clock adoration.

“There was one story of a parish priest in Los Angeles who had drug dealing and prostitution on his front steps,” Granato said. “The church started the perpetual adoration, and the problems disappeared. If we put in the time for the Lord, he takes care of the problems.”


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