Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk 
25th August 2019

History and Importance of the Forty Hours' Devotion

During Holy Week, the faithful used to keep vigil in the churches before a representation of Christ's sepulchre from the time of His death - at Nones of Good Friday - until His Resurrection, which is celebrated by the Paschal Procession in the early morning of Easter: a period of around 40 hours in total.

The veneration of Christ in the tomb was repeated outside of Holy Week beginning in the 16th century, in response to the Protestant denial of the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacred Host outside the Mass. The Forty Hours, at first considered an exceptional devotion, appeared in Milan in 1527 amidst wars and calamity (Sack of Rome). In 1537, the Milanese Capuchin Giuseppe da Ferno took up the practice and made of it a series of solemn prayers with a Eucharistic Procession: when one parish ended its Forty Hours, another took its place, such that the Holy Sacrament was adored perpetually (this practice is the origin of Perpetual Adoration). St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria (1539), the founder, also at Milan, of the Clerks Regular of St. Paul (the Barnabites) promoted them with great zeal.

In 1550, St. Philip Neri introduced this devotion in Rome and had the custom of organising it at the beginning of each month in the various churches of the confraternities he directed. Beginning in 1556, the Jesuit Order was used to making the Forty Hours' prayer from Quinquagesima Sunday to the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, in order to expiate the faults committed during Carnival.

In 1575 the Archbishop of Milan, St. Charles Borromeo, organised that the Blessed Sacrament would be exposed for three days before Lent, in the Cathedral of Milan, and in 30 other churches in the city; in the morning and evening there would be a solemn procession.

On the 25 November 1592, Pope Clement VIII, organised the Forty Hours in the city of Rome in the form in which it had been done previously by Giuseppe da Ferno: in a continuous manner, the prayers would begin in one Roman Church just as they ended in another. The Pope asked that the prayer of Forty Hours be made for three intentions: 1. For the salvation of the Kingdom of France. 2. For the victory of Christianity against the Turks. 3. For the unity of the Church.

Consecutive Popes continued to zealously exhort the Bishops and Priests throughout the world to embrace this devotion as an essential means of making reparation and asking God for blessings upon the Church.