Saint Rose of Viterbo Convent — One Hundred Forty-One Years of Unbroken Prayer

Just outside La Crosse stands a convent that once achieved something rare in the history of American religious life: a century and forty-one years of prayer that never stopped, not for a single day or hour, from eighteen seventy-eight until February of twenty twenty.

The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration arrived in Wisconsin in a roundabout way. The congregation was founded in Bavaria in eighteen forty-nine, immigrated to Milwaukee, then moved to Jefferson, Wisconsin, before arriving in La Crosse in eighteen seventy-one when the new Diocese of La Crosse was established. They carried with them a twin mission, healthcare and education for the surrounding community, and something more unusual: a commitment to perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, meaning that at every hour of the day and night, at least one sister would be kneeling in prayer in the chapel.

They began that practice on August first, eighteen seventy-eight. Through fires, epidemics, two world wars, the social upheavals of the nineteen sixties, and the gradual decline in religious vocations that emptied convents across America, the Franciscan Sisters kept the watch. One after another, women knelt in the Adoration Chapel at two in the morning, at four, at midnight, maintaining a chain of contemplative presence that stretched from the Grant administration to the twenty-first century.

The motherhouse itself, Saint Rose of Viterbo Convent, built in nineteen oh six in Romanesque style, is named for a thirteenth-century Italian mystic and street preacher who died as a teenager. The Mary of the Angels Chapel on the grounds is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The unbroken adoration ended in February twenty twenty after one hundred forty-one years, as the aging community could no longer sustain the nighttime hours. But the convent continues, and the sisters continue their mission, a link to a Wisconsin that was built, in part, by immigrant women who arrived with prayers already in progress.