Eucharistic Communities
Across the world, Catholic communities have formed around a shared conviction — that Eucharistic adoration is not one devotion among many, but the source and center of everything else. Here are a few, old and new, lay and religious, that place the Blessed Sacrament at their heart.
Emmanuel Community
The Emmanuel Community is a Catholic Public Association of the Faithful of Pontifical Right, founded in Paris in 1972 by Pierre Goursat. Present today in more than 60 countries, it is a worldwide family of laypeople, priests, and consecrated members bound together by one conviction: that a personal encounter with Jesus Christ changes everything.
From its earliest days, the community’s charism has been rooted in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus — the wellspring, its members say, of adoration, compassion, and evangelization, the three pillars that have marked Emmanuel’s life since the beginning. Eucharistic adoration sits at the center of that life: a daily encounter with the living God hidden in the Bread of Life, from which flows a call to share Christ’s compassion with the poor and to proclaim the Gospel to every corner of the earth.
Communities gather locally for adoration, fraternal life, and mission — carrying forward the words Our Lord spoke to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial: “Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love.”
- Founder: Pierre Goursat
- Charism: Adoration, Compassion, Evangelization
- Devotion: The Sacred Heart of Jesus
- Reach: 60+ countries, every continent
Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament
Known to many simply as the Blessed Sacrament Fathers, this congregation of priests, deacons, and brothers was founded in Paris in 1856 by St. Peter Julian Eymard, a priest so consumed by love for the Eucharist that the Church remembers him today as the “Apostle of the Eucharist.” His entire religious family exists for one purpose: to live the mystery of the Eucharist fully and make it known, so that Christ’s Eucharistic reign might come.
Eymard established one of the first public expositions of the Blessed Sacrament in Paris in 1857, in a converted building on a street whose name literally meant “street of hell” — a deliberate sign that adoration belongs even, especially, in the world’s darkest corners. The congregation he founded now has members in nearly 30 countries, and a sister congregation, the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament, carries the same charism among women religious.
Their motto, in Latin, says plainly what the community exists for: Adveniat Regnum Tuum Eucharisticum — “Thy Eucharistic Kingdom Come.”
- Founder: St. Peter Julian Eymard
- Charism: Eucharistic apostolate and adoration
- Motto: Thy Eucharistic Kingdom Come
- Reach: Nearly 30 countries, 5 continents
Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem
Founded in 1975 at the church of St. Gervais in the heart of Paris, the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem set out to do something unusual: bring the silence and prayer of the desert monks into the middle of a modern city. Their founder, Father Pierre-Marie Delfieux, described the vision simply — in the desert of the urban world, the monastery should be an oasis of peace, prayer, and joy.
The brothers and sisters of Jerusalem work ordinary jobs in the cities where they live, then return each evening to their community church for the daily Eucharistic celebration and hours of the Divine Office, open to anyone who wants to step out of the noise of the city and pray alongside them. Each Monday is kept as a “desert day” — silence and solitude, echoing the discipline that shaped their founder’s own years in the Sahara.
From that first house behind Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, the community has grown to houses in Strasbourg, Florence, Rome, Warsaw, Brussels, and Montreal, each one built around the same rhythm: work by day, adoration by night, in the city rather than apart from it.
- Founder: Fr. Pierre-Marie Delfieux
- Charism: Urban monastic life, daily Eucharist
- Motto: An oasis in the desert of the city
- Reach: France, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Canada
Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist
Founded in 1997 under the care of John Cardinal O’Connor, the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist have become one of the most recognized women’s religious communities in the United States — and one of the fastest-growing. Their spiritual life is shaped by classic Dominican spirituality, with a particular emphasis on Eucharistic adoration and devotion to Mary.
Each day the sisters gather for Holy Mass, the Divine Office, a Eucharistic holy hour, the rosary, and renewal of their Marian consecration — a rhythm the sisters describe as contemplative first and apostolic second. It’s from that hour before the Blessed Sacrament, they say, that everything else in their active life of teaching and evangelization overflows, carrying forward St. Dominic’s own missionary zeal to preach the truth.
Based at their motherhouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the community now sends sisters into classrooms and parishes across the country, most recognizable by their traditional white habit and the deep conviction, worn openly, that Christ in the Eucharist comes first.
- Founded under: John Cardinal O’Connor
- Charism: Eucharistic adoration and Marian devotion
- Motherhouse: Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Apostolate: Catholic education and evangelization