A Message from Father James Kubicki,
U.S. Director – Apostleship of Prayer

Shortly after I was ordained in 1983 I began giving preached retreats based on the "Spiritual Exercises" of St. Ignatius. I found that on any given retreat, which usually averaged 60 people, someone would come in and ask about what they could do. A son or a daughter or all their children had stopped practicing the Catholic faith. Some had left to join an evangelical church. Others had simply stopped practicing any religion and had drifted into an unhealthy and self-destructive lifestyle. What could they do to bring them back?

For me this was one of the moments when I felt most helpless in my ministry as a priest. I was ordained to help people. I had studied for years so that I could answer people’s troubling questions. But here I was helpless, unable to give the advice that would give the answer to their question, that would bring the quick and easy solution to their problems.

In time I found a resource to help me help these people. I discovered the Marian Mantle Group. I was able to show these people that their situation is not hopeless and that they are not helpless. Why? Because God alone is our hope and with God we have the greatest help in the world. Alone and unaided we are hopeless and helpless, but with God we have the One "who is able to accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine" (Ephesians 3: 20).

With every retreat now, I take along copies of contact information for the Marian Mantle Group and I tell people who are agonizing over their wandering children that they are not alone, that there are others who have come together in a great spiritual communion. Together they share the burden and it becomes lighter. Together they join their prayers and they become powerful. Together they share both the pain and the faith that helps them endure the pain and find the hope they need to keep praying.

I thank God for the Marian Mantle Group and the consolation it has brought to so many who suffer one of the greatest pains a parent can suffer. They suffer now, not alone, but with others and with the Son of God who came and gave His life so that the wandering would be found and carried back to the Father in those arms that were once nailed to a cross.

Fr. James M. Kubicki, S.J.
U.S. Director – Apostleship of Prayer