VATICAN CITY, OCT. 16, 2005 (Zenit.org).- The most effective medicine to alleviate drug addiction could be the Eucharist, suggests the founder of the Community of the Cenacle.
Sister Elvira Petrozzi, addressing the Synod of Bishops last Wednesday, explained how devotion to the Blessed Sacrament changed the lives of many youth recovering from drug addiction.
«What therapeutic method or medicine could I offer them?» she asked, referring to drug addicts. «There is no pill that can give them the joy to live and peace in the heart!»
«I proposed to them what lifted me and gave me back hope so many times: the mercy of God and Eucharistic prayer,» she answered.
«The Eucharist cannot be understood by one’s brain, but it is felt in the heart,» she said. «If you trustfully kneel before him, you will feel that his humanity present in the consecrated host reawakens God’s image in you that returns to shine.
«It is the ‘Eucharistic miracle’ that I have been contemplating for so many years. The Eucharist creates not only a personal dynamism, but also a dynamism of the people.»
All-nighters
Sister Petrozzi continued: «At the beginning some young people started to get up in the night for personal adoration; then every Saturday night — for them, the night to party — they decided to kneel, in each one of the 50 communities, from 2-3 a.m., to pray for those young people lost in the false lures of the world.
«Afterward they started continuous Eucharistic adoration. It was a revolution in the history of the community. Young people came from everywhere, the communities increased, missions were instituted in Latin America and then came the vocations of families and of consecrated people to God in this work of his.»
«What the Holy Father called at Cologne the revolution of love, exploded,» said the Italian religious.
Addressing the synod’s participants, Sister Petrozzi added that she «wanted to tell you with simplicity, this piece of our history, to give thanks to Jesus who in the Eucharist, left in our hands the treasure, the medicine, the most extraordinary light to come out of the darkness of evil.»
«The young people with whom I have lived for the past 22 years have been for me, a religious, the living witness that the Eucharist is really the living presence of the risen Christ, and also that our own dead life, when entering in his own, is resurrected,» she concluded.
The Community of the Cenacle, which began in 1983, today has 50 communities worldwide.
