In July, Catholics are encouraged to pray at least 10,000 Holy Hours in the hopes of a “Eucharistic revival” across America. Bishop Robert Baron of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota and founder of Word on Fire ministries said in a press release, “I hope many people will participate in this campaign as a public witness to the centrality of the Eucharist.” Participants are encouraged to log their hours on the Word on Fire website, where a map of those who have prayed and a prayer counter is visible to keep score.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Barron described a Holy hour as “an uninterrupted time of prayer in the presence of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. So, in the presence of the Eucharist, to pray for an hour, just as Jesus asked his three disciples at Gethsemane to stay and pray with me for an hour.” According to its website, “Word on Fire Catholic Ministries is a nonprofit global media apostolate that supports the work of Bishop Robert Barron and reaches millions of people to draw them into — or back to — the Catholic faith.” The ministry is self-described as “evangelical” and “Catholic.”
Barron encourages everyone to take time to pray, suggesting, “Well, if you can’t do a Holy hour, do a Holy half hour. You can’t do a Holy half hour, how about even 10 minutes a day? Sequester some time every day to focus on the Lord.” The bishop added, “Now, it might be scripture reading. It might be the praying of a decade of the Rosary. It might be simply asking God to help someone who’s suffering. Take the time every day to focus on God.” Barron shared that he believes people’s lives change when they invest their time in the presence of God. The bishop stressed, “What I found over many years now of pastoral ministry is when people do that, their lives change, period. They just do.”
According to the bishop, what stands in the way of Americans’ faith generally is “secularism or materialism.” For younger people, Barron argued that a lack of faith in God can sometimes come from too much faith in science. The bishop said, “This view, which is increasingly strong among young people, is that all there is, in reality, is the world that we can see with our senses, that we can measure with our scientific instruments, the world of our immediate experience. That’s all that matters.” Barron added, “And, you know, from time immemorial, people have intuited, no, no, there’s more to reality than that. There’s the world that we can see and measure. Yes. But then there’s a transcendent world in which that world is situated, upon which it depends the reality of God and the things of God.”
As far as the 2024 elections go, Barron takes no political sides but believes that faith in God should take precedence. “What concerns me politically is that let’s say for a lot of people under 45, let’s say, belief in God, that’s much more tenuous, a belief in a stable human nature, belief in objective moral values, not as strong as it was,” he said. The bishop added, “And I think that basically, spiritual and moral vision is indispensable to a healthy political life. So I would encourage people to get back into that spiritual and moral space, which would then inform their political decision-making.”
Over 4,000 Holy hours of prayer have currently been logged this month, according to the Word on Fire website.