A
AlbertDerGrosse
Guest
I’m a native San Franciscan. My city gets a bad rap at times, I know, most of it well deserved. This is definitely a difficult city to be a Christian in. I’m used to our bad reputation and seeing it disparaged on comboxes across the internet whenever something gratuitously liberal (or more often is the case, libertine) comes up, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with SF. Consider the times people speak of God needing to knock SF into the ocean with a good, overdue earthquake. Heck, even I’ve at times wondered to myself why we haven’t been visited with more calamities in the past.
On Sunday (transferred Corpus Christi) I saw something remarkable: a Eucharistic procession through the streets of the Haight-Ashbury district, a neighborhood infamously known as the birthplace of many counter-culture movements on the West Coast. Right there among the old hippies who haven’t figured out the 60s are over, and the descendants of their legacy shooting up heroin in the darkened doorways of vacant storefronts, was a group of nuns processing with our Lord through gunk and grime passing by equally confused tourists and locals. I myself had no idea these nuns even existed.
I followed the procession back to their convent which is ironically located across the street from the Grateful Dead House. The former predates the latter by a number of decades. It turns out the sisters established this convent in 1928 when they fled Mexico during the violence of the Cristero War in Guadalajara. They’ve had Perpetual Adoration of Our Lord in the Eucharist at this convent ever since.
Right when the city began to lose its collective mind in the 1960s these women were there at ground zero in the very neighborhood in which it all started, praying before Our Lord 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And they’re still praying, even while our Board of Supervisors do things like condemn the Vatican in non-binding legislative resolutions as a meddling foreign agent, or extort the Archdiocese with a 22 million dollar tax levy. These women who’ve already fled violent anti-clericalism once are still praying and making acts of reparation to Our Lord for the excesses of our rampant secularism. God really does have a funny way of writing straight with crooked lines.
I hope the next time San Francisco finds its way into the news for something unflattering, if not sacrilegious or blasphemous, more people will remember to pray for these nuns and the work they’re doing in keeping God’s ire at bay before condemning the rest of us. I’m firmly convinced now these women are the reason we’re still here.
The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration:
adorejesus.org
On Sunday (transferred Corpus Christi) I saw something remarkable: a Eucharistic procession through the streets of the Haight-Ashbury district, a neighborhood infamously known as the birthplace of many counter-culture movements on the West Coast. Right there among the old hippies who haven’t figured out the 60s are over, and the descendants of their legacy shooting up heroin in the darkened doorways of vacant storefronts, was a group of nuns processing with our Lord through gunk and grime passing by equally confused tourists and locals. I myself had no idea these nuns even existed.
I followed the procession back to their convent which is ironically located across the street from the Grateful Dead House. The former predates the latter by a number of decades. It turns out the sisters established this convent in 1928 when they fled Mexico during the violence of the Cristero War in Guadalajara. They’ve had Perpetual Adoration of Our Lord in the Eucharist at this convent ever since.
Right when the city began to lose its collective mind in the 1960s these women were there at ground zero in the very neighborhood in which it all started, praying before Our Lord 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And they’re still praying, even while our Board of Supervisors do things like condemn the Vatican in non-binding legislative resolutions as a meddling foreign agent, or extort the Archdiocese with a 22 million dollar tax levy. These women who’ve already fled violent anti-clericalism once are still praying and making acts of reparation to Our Lord for the excesses of our rampant secularism. God really does have a funny way of writing straight with crooked lines.
I hope the next time San Francisco finds its way into the news for something unflattering, if not sacrilegious or blasphemous, more people will remember to pray for these nuns and the work they’re doing in keeping God’s ire at bay before condemning the rest of us. I’m firmly convinced now these women are the reason we’re still here.
The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration:
adorejesus.org
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