Earlier this week I mentioned I would give you the details about a miracle and a sacrilege which a priest told us he had personally witnessed, and then tell you what we are doing in response to his request.
Below, you can watch me in a short video. Please share this broadly. (There’s a summarized semi-transcript below if you’d like to read about it, instead.)
In response to this priest’s request for prayer and reparation, we are giving away one of the Divine Praises prayer cards free of charge with every order until the end of the Olympics.
Also until the end of the Olympics: we’re offering the below prayer cards at less than a dime each in packs of 5 (order as many 5-packs as you’d like).
Divine Praises Prayer Cards (5-pack)
SPANISH Divine Praises Prayer Cards (5-pack)
Below is an approximate summarization of the above video if you want to read instead of watch. Please share the blog post with your friends, and the video is probably also easy to share.
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After Mass, the priest told us to sit down, then (through the translation of the Deacon) he told us of the Eucharistic miracle which showed him that “Jesus was with me in prison.”
But then, after telling his story–he then told us of a sacrilege he had witnessed in this very parish after an earlier Mass.
And he made an urgent request to all of us struck me—which is the reason for what we are now doing until August 11th.
This wasn’t our usual parish. Running very late in the morning, Kerri & I decided to go to another parish which had a Sunday afternoon Mass time which we could make.
When we arrived, we discovered that the church was being refurbished, so Mass was held in the activity center. This center included a large square open area with several glass doors on every side of the building.
A nice altar had been set up and a tabernacle set up in the place of honor behind it, very reverent and nicely appointed.
We knew the pastor of the church, but when Mass began and the priest entered, we had never seen this priest who was celebrating before.
In his homily, he mentioned only being able to receive Communion once in all the months he was in prison.
I did some research after the Mass to discover who he was. Here’s a link to one of the articles I found from the US Commission on international Religious Freedom and another one upon his release into exile.
He was arrested with the bishop of Nicaragua and given a 10 year prison sentence. However, he was fortunate enough to be one of 222 political prisoners released and exiled from Nicaragua in the past few years.
Celebrating Mass while in prison was forbidden, and this we El Chipote, a prison notorious for being the place where political prisoners were tortured.
But once the Eucharist was snuck into the prison. Before receiving Communion, he want to adore for a bit, but there was nowhere to place Him—the floor was filthy–so he put Him into an eyeglass case.
Knowing that if it was discovered what they were doing, he cautiously knelt down to adore…but tried to disguise what they could be doing.
Then: the miracle. Slowly everyone in the entire cell block knelt down in their cells—and no matter where they were they all faced the Blessed Sacrament. No one else knew that Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament was there!
“That truly made me realize,” he said, “Jesus was with me in prison.”
Then he spoke of the sacrilege discovered in the parish after an earlier Mass: beside one of the glass doors leading outside a consecrated Host was found lying there on the floor.
He pointed to the door that was only 10 or so feet away from us! Dropped, discarded, whatever the intent, this mistreatment was done by someone who had come to Mass in that very parish.
The deacon stressed, “Do not allow anyone to walk away without consuming the Host when given Communion!”
He asked for prayers and reparation for this sacrilege.
It reminded me of the requests by many bishops for prayer and reparation for public mocking, ridicule, and defaming of the Last Supper and Christ in the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics. Archbishop Hartmayer of Atlanta summarized this in a letter here.
The Divine Praises are a traditional prayer of reparation. Knowing we had thousands of Divine Praises prayer cards, we decided to reduce the price of quantities of 5 or more to less than a dime each.
We print locally, not in China, so this is less than our total cost, but we agreed to give them away until the end of the Olympics (August 11th).
We were unprepared for the response: the existing stock sold out, so we re-printed a quantity five times what we had previously had in stock. That is almost sold out, so we are reprinting again in an even larger quantity.
We have also added a Spanish-language card to the offer.
Get them and share widely: your parish, stock a local chapel, back-to-school, homeschool co-op, coffee shop, athletic team, etc. We will produce as many as are needed.
Ken Davison created Glory Stories, which became a weekly radio series heard globally on the Ave Maria Satellite Radio Network and EWTN’s radio network, WEWN. In 2007, he and his wife, Kerri, founded Holy Heroes–and their children stepped in to help shortly thereafter to create the online “Adventures” for Advent, Lent, Spiritual Adoption, and Marian Consecration.
