By Joe Pisani
TRUMBULL— One winter night while Angelica Martinez was house-sitting, the homeowner told her there was perpetual adoration in a nearby chapel. She stopped doing her schoolwork and headed there to check it out, and the experience changed her life.
“It was a place of refuge where things made sense,” she recalled. “Even in my heart, it made sense, and it was where I desired to be. I felt at home. I spent so much time there, but didn’t even realize it, because the Lord captured my attention and my heart.”
Angelica’s experiences at the adoration chapel of St. Theresa Parish in Trumbull started her on a path that eventually led her to develop a program promoting perpetual Eucharistic adoration in parishes throughout the diocese, so that everyone can spend time in the presence of the Eucharistic Jesus throughout the day and night.
She was drawn to adoration during a period of change in her life. She had been studying electrical engineering and then switched her major to religious studies, but ended up putting her education on hold in order to help her sister who was confronting a health crisis. The second of 11 children, Angelica took a step back and began to ask herself personal questions like, “What am I spending my time on? Is it geared toward heaven or increasing the comfort in my life?”
She says the Lord “really shook her up” once she began searching for answers, and throughout this process of self-examination, she found herself “falling in love with the Lord.” Shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, she applied to a leadership program sponsored by the GIVEN Institute, which is committed to “activating the gifts of young adult women for the Catholic Church and the world” through training, faith formation and mentoring.
As her project, she decided to put together a plan that would encourage more people to spend time in Eucharistic adoration.
“Everything that happened before the Lord in adoration and all he had done for me, I wanted others to have,” she said. “So I focused on ideas that would bring people to adoration.”
When she attended the GIVEN conference at Catholic University of America in Washington, she met her mentor, Sister Lucy of the Apostolic Sisters of St. John in New Jersey, a contemplative/ apostolic community dedicated to spreading the love of God in the spirit of St. John.
Together, they worked on a plan to help parishes start perpetual adoration chapels that would make the Lord available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“He is available a good bit throughout the diocese already,” Angelica said, “but how about 12 am? There are often times you can’t sleep and are seeking something, so this would let you go for a drive and visit the Lord, if only for a few minutes.”
Most of her time in adoration occurred in the middle of the night, when she encountered other people who came into the chapel for their own special reasons.
“My training came from my time being before the Lord, being there with others who needed him as much as I do,” she said. “They are people who just want to be with him.”
During those nocturnal hours, she began to pray for guidance on her project, and she promised, “Lord, wherever you want to go, I’ll go.” St. Pius X Parish in Fairfield immediately came to mind. She had met the pastor, Father Samuel Kachuba, 16 years before when he was a transitional deacon at St. Mary in Norwalk, and she had been to the Mother of God Chapel at St. Pius X.
“She talked about this desire in her heart to help parishes start perpetual adoration and said that God had inspired this,” Father Kachuba recalled. “We realized we already had so many things in place, including a chapel that’s open 24 hours a day, where Jesus is present, so it was really a question of organizing it and getting things going.”
Today, Angelica is coordinating the effort with a team of volunteers at St. Pius X.
“When Father said, ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ I knew this was the Lord’s gift to us,” she said. “The Lord has humbled me, and he has continued to ask me to just show up, and he will do the rest. I recognize I can’t do anything by myself.”
In her mission to spread perpetual Eucharistic Adoration, Angelica is approaching other parishes, some of which already have adoration during the day.
Angelica says the Lord and Our Lady have led her effort right from the start.
“Wherever the Lord sends me, I will go,” she says. “I am eternally grateful, and I recognize the beauty of what we are building. Now, the Lord will be available to us—his children— at all times in the Eucharist.”
