Continuing to strive for Perpetual Adoration on Campus

As one of their Lenten outreaches this year, Campus Ministry has extended the hours of adoration in the Coleman-Morse Chapel. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the hours will be extended to 8 pm, while the usual 10 am – 5 pm hours will remain on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This change has been welcomed by students as the new slots have filled up rapidly.

This extension of the adoration hours is the fruit of a combined effort between Campus Ministry and several undergraduate students, primarily Mary Ebberwein, Mackenzie Kraker, Mary Benz, and myself. Adoration is crucial particularly in this time of Lent when Christ’s words to the Apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane seem particularly poignant: “Watch and pray” (Matthew 26:41). We are called to spend time with the One we love as we progress towards both Good Friday and Easter, and what better way can there be than to sit with Him and offer Him our time? With the extension, finding space to visit Our Lord in the Eucharist is possible more often than ever.

In a Rover article from last October, “Satiating the thirst for Christ,” I called for perpetual adoration on campus and discussed the importance of adoration. Extending the hours is a wonderful step towards that goal for which I am grateful. In particular, the extended hours make it easier to invite members of our Notre Dame community to adoration who do not know what adoration is, do not know adoration is available, or are uncomfortable in participating without an invitation.

However, I would also like to challenge our entire community, particularly the underclassmen and all those who will be on campus for the coming years, to continue fighting for perpetual adoration. I am firmly convinced that the Lord wants to be more present on our campus. This Lent, we need to demonstrate that we appreciate adoration in order to really achieve the dream of having perpetual adoration.

I will continue to pray, even after I am no longer a student here, that perpetual adoration might become a reality. As great as our university is, one would have to be blind to think it had no faults, and one would also have to be blind to think the Eucharist cannot do anything to remedy those faults. Ultimately, it is the Lord who is fighting for this.

Prudence is not prudence if it leads us to relegate our zeal for the Lord to a tiny corner of our lives.

I will close simply, with a quote from Pope St. John Paul II during his address at World Youth Day 2000, one which the group of us who have been working on adoration have been pondering and focusing on throughout this entire struggle. Please read it two, or even three times, and I would invite you to really meditate on the places where you see this longing in yourself, and to move to fill that with time in adoration:

“It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”

Therese Benz is a senior English major who is incredibly passionate about the saints. If you would like to discuss any or all of them with her, she can be contacted at tbenz@nd.edu.