Diego’s faith in Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament changed his family’s reality of abuse, alcoholism and poverty
Patricio Hileman, the priest responsible for building Perpetual Adoration chapels all throughout Latin America, shared the touching testimony of Diego, an 8-year-old Mexican boy whose faith in the Blessed Sacrament transformed his family’s reality, marked by problems related to domestic violence, alcoholism and poverty.
The story happened in Mérida, the capital city of Yucatán, Mexico, right in the first chapel of Perpetual Adoration that the Missionaries of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament established in the city.
Father Hileman told ACI Group that the little boy heard him preaching that “those who are willing to be at vigil at dawn, Jesus will bless a hundred times more.”
“I would also say that Jesus invites his friends to the Holy Hour, and that he would also ask them: ‘Can not you watch an hour with me?’” recalled the Argentine priest.
His words made the child decide to start his vigil at 3:00 in the morning, something that naturally caught the attention of his mother, to whom the boy explained that he would do it because “I want my dad to stop drinking, and that we can no longer be poor.”
During the first week, the mother accompanied him. The second week, Diego invited his father.
“A month later, they began to participate in perpetual adoration, and the father testified that he had experienced the love of Jesus, and was healed.” Right after that, “he fell in love with his wife, during those holy hours,” Hileman said. “The father stopped drinking, and fighting with his wife, and they were able to leave poverty behind. Because of the faith of an 8-year-old child, a whole family was healed.”
This is one of several conversion testimonies that, according to Hileman, often happen in Perpetual Adoration chapels, an initiative of the Missionaries of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, a community he founded. “The first commandment of perpetual adoration is to allow oneself to be ‘embraced’ by Jesus,” said father Hileman on his visit to Chile. “It is the place where we learn to rest in the heart of Jesus.”
The priest explained this initiative began in 1993 in Seville, Spain, when St. John Paul II expressed his desire that “every parish in the world could have a chapel of Perpetual Adoration, where Jesus could be exposed in the Blessed Sacrament, in a custody, solemnly worshiped day and night, without interruption.” Hileman also recalled that “St. John Paul II spent 6 hours of adoration a day, wrote documents while in front of the exposed Blessed Sacrament, and would spend all night in adoration once a week. That is the secret of the saints, that is the secret of the Church: being centered and united in Christ.”
