This Sept. 11 marks 796 years since perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament began in Avignon, France, a practice that has now spread throughout the world.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, perpetual adoration refers to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament without interruption or with pauses for only short periods of time.
The term is used “in a moral sense, when it is interrupted only for a short time, or for imperative reasons, or for circumstances beyond control, to be resumed, however, as soon as possible,” he added.
The encyclopaedia indicates that many experts attribute the beginning of the practice of ado-ration of Jesus in the Eucharist to the moment in which the feast of Corpus Christi was established in 1246 by Bishop Roberto de Thorete, at the suggestion of St. Juliana de Mont Cornillon.
However, the first recorded perpetual adoration was in Avignon in 1226.
On Sept. 11, King Louis VII asked to expose the Blessed Sacrament as a way to celebrate victory over the Albigensians, a sect that flourished in southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. “In thanksgiving, the Blessed Sacrament covered with a veil was exposed in the Chapel of the Holy Cross” in Orleans, reads the encyclopedia.