The
moment a monstrance bearing the Blessed Sacrament was fixed high over
an altar in a convent church in a remote French valley, a nun stepped
forward to start the process of eucharistic adoration – one the sisters
hope will continue day and night, week after week and year after year.
Mother Marie Xavier McMonagle thus began the perpetual adoration of the
“Tyburn Nuns,” an order of enclosed contemplative Benedictine nuns
established to worship the “eucharistic heart of Jesus.”
In so doing, she also closed a day of ceremonies to install the order’s newest community, situated near Dijon, France.
This community, the 12th to be established in less than a century, has
eight members, each of whom will spend a minimum of one hour a day in
adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes they will be assisted
by lay Catholics.
A founding charism of the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of
Montmartre is the unceasing eucharistic adoration, which continues
round-the-clock when the community is large enough for its members to
physically and mentally sustain such prayer.
At present there seems to be no shortage of women expressing an interest
in such devotion because the opening of the convent Sept. 29 represents
the latest expansion of a female religious order which – like the
Nashville Dominicans in the U.S. – is growing rapidly while others
decline.
Mother Marie Adele Garnier founded the order in Paris in 1898, and it
had a rocky start. Initially, its members were struck by unseen blows
and showered with altar breads, among a range of terrifying supernatural
attacks they attributed to the devil.
France’s Law of Associations, which forbade the existence of religious
groups unregistered by the state, eventually caused them to move to
London. In 1903 the nuns established a convent close to the site of the
Tyburn gallows, where at least 105 Catholics were martyred during the
Reformation.
Of more than 90 professed sisters and some 30 novices in the French
convent, about half are from Australia and New Zealand, including the
mother general, but new houses in Latin America are creating increased
interest in vocations.
The nuns see a deeper significance in their new convent than simply
sustained growth. For them, it heralds a sort of homecoming more than a
century after they were driven from the land of their foundress.
The eight nuns forming the new community come from around the world: Ireland, France, Peru, Ecuador, Australia and New Zealand.
In welcoming the nuns, Bishop Philippe Gueneley of Langres, who had
written to the mother general requesting their presence in his diocese
last November, paid tribute to their openness to the will of God.
“You are building a community that is shining forth in charity,” he said.