Welcome and Introduction
Welcome to the Vox Sponsae Substack, a publication of the St. Thomas More House of Prayer!
For this first Substack, I would like to take the opportunity to introduce you to myself and to our apostolate. My name is Nathan Wigfield and I serve as the Executive Director of the St. Thomas More House of Prayer, which is a Catholic retreat center nestled in the woods of Northwestern Pennsylvania that is dedicated to praying and promoting the Liturgy of the Hours.
The House of Prayer was founded by Wayne and Patty Hepler in December of 1999. From the very beginning, our mission has been inspired by the Church’s intention to restore the Divine Office to its rightful place in the life of the Church (as expressed in the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) and make the Liturgy of the Hours the prayer, not just of priests and religious, but of the whole people of God (Catechism, 1175).
For the past 25 years, we have made it our aim to make a public and communal offering of the Liturgy of the Hours daily in our beautiful chapel. We have hosted individuals and groups of lay people, clergy, and religious from far and wide, all of whom have helped us fulfill our mission. In doing so, we have had countless opportunities to introduce people to the Liturgy of the Hours, educate them on what the Church teaches about her prayer, and equip them to go back home and share it with their family, friends, and fellow parishioners.
In our experience, it is often the case that our guests want to pray more and pray better. They come on retreat thirsting for prayer - that “vital and personal relationship with the living and true God” that the Catechism talks about. And our guests almost always end up leaving with a desire to begin praying the Liturgy of the Hours and share it with others. What they discover after praying the Divine Office in community for two or three days is that nothing can compare with the richness, beauty, and spiritual depth that the public and communal prayer of the Catholic Church offers. Undoubtedly, this is because the Divine Office is part of the Sacred Liturgy, which the Church says is “unequaled in its power and degree of effectiveness.”
Among other things, the General Instructions of the Liturgy of the Hours tells us that all who pray the Divine Office not only help to fulfill the Church’s duty, but also share in the very prayer of Christ Himself, sanctify the time of each day along with the whole range of human activity, and have access to holiness of the richest kind. In fact, we are told that when we pray the Liturgy of the Hours we share in the greatest honor of Christ’s spouse by standing before the throne of God and interceding for the salvation of the world.
No wonder people, once they are introduced to it, are drawn to the prayer of the Church!
In his letter To the Church in the New Millennium, Pope St. John Paul II said that, unless Christians had a prayer that was able to fill the whole of their life, they would not only be mediocre Christians, but Christians at risk. He then went on to call Christian communities to become “genuine schools of prayer,” in which the faithful would be educated especially in the Liturgy of the Hours.
As a Catholic retreat center dedicated to praying and promoting the Liturgy of the Hours, this is what we seek to become for our guests - a genuine school of prayer that educates them in the Church’s prayer and equips them to begin praying it so that it can become for them that source of unceasing prayer, devotion, and holiness that we all so desperately need.
My hope for this Substack is that it can serve to further the mission of the St. Thomas More House of Prayer and, in doing so, help people better understand and appreciate the depth of the Liturgy of the Hours so that they can pray it with greater devotion and spiritual fervor.
In the next post, we will discuss the meaning of “Vox Sponsae” and why I chose this title for this Substack.