Original article by Julia Duin
Last year, I did an interesting experiment during Lent where I decided to show up at a Catholic church every day to take part in something called the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This is not at all a Protestant practice nor something I grew up with, but I wanted to keep vigil, as it were, and Catholic churches were the only places that were consistently open during daylight hours for prayer. This, I decided, would be a discipline where my main sacrifice during Lent would not be food or chocolates but time.
...I was amazed at the number of people devoting time to adoration. Of course these were churches that devoted time and space for people to take advantage of this form of devotion and kept their churches open enough hours of the day to allow people to drop by. Some of my data is a year old, so I hope these churches have enlarged their hours but I have a feeling most have not. Or, if they have adoration times, they are impossible to find on church web sites. Or the information on the web sites is old.
Again, I am not Catholic, so my observations are from without the camp. Still, the center of any parish is the people who pray for it, and I could pretty well judge the health of a church by the space it devoted to adoration. As a non-Catholic, I hope that Catholics can up their game on this adoration idea. There’s more to it than even they know.
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