This we know: without a shepherd, there can be no flock, and without a priest, there can be no Church.
But how can the flock serve its shepherd?
It’s no secret—our priests are stretched thinner than ever. A life in the priesthood has always been one of sacrifice, but today’s priests face unique challenges, and there’s not enough of them to go around. According to Vatican data from 2020, there is an average of one priest for every 3,210 Catholics in the world.
As such, parishioners are stepping up and doing more than ever to support their pastors and keep their faith communities thriving. Many show their support through donations, volunteering or by simply inviting their pastor for dinner. But perhaps the most important form of support is through prayer.
One group that’s risen to meet this need of our modern-day Church is the Seven Sisters Apostolate, founded in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
The ministry began in 2010 when a woman named Janette Howe felt a “nudge” to offer prayer specifically for the benefit of her pastor, Father Joseph Johnson, through a holy hour each week. The next nudge came on March 24, 2011, during one of her holy hours. Howe recalls hearing “Seven Sisters” in her heart, eventually realizing that God was directing her to form a group of seven women in her community to offer a holy hour each day for Father Johnson.
Howe brought this calling to Father Johnson, who advised her to bring the apostolate to seven parishes. By June of that same year, 49 women (seven from seven churches) made their pledges to commit to a year of weekly holy hours, and today the Seven Sisters Apostolate is present in nearly 1,400 parishes, chanceries, seminaries, hospitals and other locations throughout the country—including right here in the Diocese of Youngstown.
“It’s more sacrifice than most of us would ever make for the Church in our lifetime, I believe,” said Deanna Langer, anchoress for the apostolate at her home parish of St. Paul in North Canton. “What we do is a small token back.”
Langer first heard about the apostolate in the spring of 2023 from a friend, and she decided to start the program at her parish.
“I can be a little shy to start something new … but you have to kind of get over that and get on with what it is because God calls us out of our comfort zones,” she said. “A lot of times, you hear things and it goes in one ear and out the other but obviously (this) just resonated with me so I prayed about it and felt like I was called to start a group at St. Paul’s.”
Langer, a lifelong Catholic, knows how rewarding ministry can be for not only those served but for the participants themselves. For example, it was as a member of the Youngstown State University’s Search Retreat ministry—a student-led program that plans retreats for high-schoolers—that she met her future husband, Frank. They moved to North Canton after graduation and joined St. Paul Parish.
The apostolate takes its inspiration from the biblical story of the woman anointing Jesus with expensive perfume in Bethany (Matthew 26:6-13). The apostles initially rebuke the woman for “this waste,” but Jesus in turn corrects them, saying “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me.” The sisters seek to emulate this “holy wasting,” lavishing priests and bishops with an outpouring of prayer for the sake of their sacrifice for Christ.
“We need the Eucharist, first and foremost. If we don’t have sacramentally ordained priests to carry on the Eucharist, we’re in big trouble. Especially in the American Church, it just seems like vocations are hard to come by.”
“If we could do anything spiritually to support them, I thought it was a great idea because they’re stretched very thin,” Langer continued. “There’s more and more priests retiring and fewer coming in through the seminary and hopefully we can help in some way to reverse that (and)help the current priests to just be a little happier in their vocation or feel like somebody’s got their back, spiritually.”
Langer recalls how her pastor at St. Paul Parish, Father John Keehner (now the Bishop-elect of the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa, for whom the May issue of The Catholic Echo will be dedicated), was touched and inspired by the devotion of the apostolate. Later, when Father Keehner became the pastor of four parishes in Ashtabula County—Our Lady Queen of Peace in Ashtabula, Corpus Christi in Conneaut, St. Andrew Bobola in Kingsville and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Geneva—Langer and the other women in her group reached out to another apostolate in Ashtabula to make sure he was still covered in prayer.
“I find that when women are approached about it, most of them are like, ‘Wow, that’s a wonderful idea! We should do that.’ And if they can, they do,” Langer said.
Langer added that spending so much time in prayer dedicated to another person has had a major impact on her prayer life and spirituality in general.
“I find these holy hours, at least for me, are very different than a (regular) holy hour. It’s given my life a lot of peace to be in God’s presence for an hour each week, even though my focus is on the pastor I’m praying for,” she said.
Kim Goodrich, anchoress for the Seven Sisters group at the Basilica of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Peter Parish in Canton, became Catholic in 2018. Although she was raised Lutheran, she says embracing Catholicism “a long time coming” and that the inclusion of the Blessed Virgin in Catholic theology was a major motivation for her.
“I have such a devotion to her now. I love the Blessed Mother,” Goodrich says. “Her whole demeanor—when you think about her humility, and her love for us, and … how Mary has such a role to play in not only our life but death—that’s a huge thing.”
Goodrich’s devotion to the Blessed Mother is also what drew her to the Seven Sisters Apostolate—one of the group’s patron saints is the Madonna of the Grapes, a miraculous image of the Blessed Mother said to have appeared in Valencia, Spain, on a grapevine leaf. The image, which has been recreated in numerous works of art, depicts Mary holding Jesus and a cluster of grapes close to her heart, with the grapes being indicative of both the Most Precious Blood of Jesus as well as “those chosen in persona Christi,” as explained on the Seven Sisters Apostolate website. The sisters in the apostolate seek to emulate Mary’s humility—oftentimes, the priest being prayed for may not even know who exactly is in the group.
“That’s what the Seven Sisters is: it’s a hidden, quiet apostolate,” Goodrich said. “Kind of like Mary, just quiet and hidden, pointing the way to Jesus.”
Goodrich was approached by the original anchoress of the group in 2020, while she was praying in the chapel during Adoration, as the last member of the group of seven.
When the anchoress started to attend another parish with her children, she asked Goodrich to take over as the new anchoress. While Goodrich admits that it was a challenge in the beginning to pray for a solid hour, she now often stays longer than an hour, and says that the practice has increased her appreciation for prayer and the peace that it brings.
But more than anything, both Langer and Goodrich are in it for the good of our priests.
“As we know, the Church is under such attack right now,” Goodrich said. “It gets darker and darker some days and the priests are also under attack and they have more and more work to do and when you see their workloads, because we have such a shortage of priests … there’s a lot of elderly priests that are retired and having to fill in. And then the priests that are working get more assignments to do … When you have someone praying for you specifically an hour (a day), seven days a week, those prayers are going to do something to help.”
There are currently Seven Sisters Apostolate groups at St. Paul Parish in North Canton, St. John the Baptist and St. Peter Parish in Canton, Divine Mercy Parish in Massillon, St. Patrick Parish in Kent, and one group for the parishes of Our Lady of Peace Parish in Ashtabula, Corpus Christi Parish in Conneaut, St. Andrew Bobola Parish in Kingsville and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish in Geneva.
Visit www.sevensistersapostolate.org for more information on the organization, or to learn how to start a group at your parish.
