Praying for Priests in Adoration Chapels

(click on the card to enlarge image)

In the Archdiocese of Brisbane, Australia the Perpetual Adoration Association has started a beautiful initiative to support the priests in the archdiocese in the Year of the Priest.

The Perpetual Adoration Association started this year in late May, with it's first Perpetual Adoration Chapel, this will reap many graces and blessings for the archdiocese. At the back of the Adoration Chapel there is an open box of envelopes and this notice:

"Please join us in praying for our Priests in the Brisbane Archdiocese.

On the trolly at the back of the Chapel there are envelopes marked "Prayer for Priests". Each envelope contains a prayer card with a preist's name on each.

There is one for every priest in our Archdiocese.

The prayer is from the Year of the Priest, Vatican website.

You may like to offer your adoration hour each week, and pray the prayer daily for the priest on your prayer card."

This is a wonderful idea for adoration chapels because praying for priests in the presence of The Lord is crucial ~ let us pray that similar holy endeavours of spiritual motherhood will spring up in many other adoration chapels around the world. It is also is an active response to a letter written by Cardinal Claudio Hummes from the Congregation of the Clergy on the 8th of December 2007. I will quote selectively from this letter with my emphasis in bold:

"In today’s world a great many things are necessary for the good of the Clergy and the fruitfulness of pastoral ministry. With a firm determination to face such challenges without disregarding their difficulties and struggles, and with an awareness that action follows being and that the soul of every apostolate is Divine intimacy, it is our intention for the departure point to be a spiritual endeavor.

In order to continually maintain a greater awareness of the ontological link between the Eucharist and the Priesthood, and in order to recognize the special maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary for each Priest, it is our intention to bring about a connection between perpetual Eucharistic adoration for the reparation of faults and sanctification of priests and the initiation of a commitment on the part of consecrated feminine souls - following the typology of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Eternal High Priest, and Helper in his work of Redemption - who might wish to spiritually adopt priests in order to help them with their self-offering, prayer, and penance.
　
Thereby – and precisely because of the place occupied and the role served by the Most Blessed Virgin in salvation history – we intend in a very particular way to entrust all Priests to Mary, the Mother of the High and Eternal Priest, bringing about in the Church a movement of prayer, placing 24 hour continuous Eucharistic adoration at the center, so that a prayer of adoration, thanksgiving, praise, petition, and reparation, will be raised to God, incessantly and from every corner of the earth, with the primary intention of awakening a sufficient number of holy vocations to the priestly state and, at the same time, spiritually uniting with a certain spiritual maternity – at the level of the Mystical Body – all those who have already been called to the ministerial priesthood and are ontologically conformed to the one High and Eternal priest.

This movement will offer better service to Christ and his brothers - those who are at once "inside" the Church and also "at the forefront" of the Church, standing in Christ’s stead and representing Him, as head, shepherd and spouse of the Church (cfr. Pastores Dabo Vobis 16).We are asking, therefore, all diocesan Ordinaries who apprehend in a particular way the specificity and irreplaceability of the ordained ministry in the life of the Church, together with the urgency of a common action in support of the ministerial priesthood, to take an active role and promote – in the different portions of the People of God entrusted to them - true and proper cenacles in which clerics, religious and lay people - united among themselves in the spirit of true communion – may devote themselves to prayer, in the form of continuous Eucharistic adoration in a spirit of genuine and authentic reparation and purification. "

Here is the letter in full. HT: Roman Catholic Vocations