Prayers on Assisi Pilgrimage

(Vatican Radio) Don’t have the time or the money to go on pilgrimage to one of the world’s many Catholic holy shrines? The Rome Vicariate’s travel and pilgrimage agency, Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi (ORP) is offering to take prayer intentions to the sites for you. Rosamaria Mancini, who manages the agency’s online “Jospers” community (an acronym for “Journeys of the Spirit”) says the ORP has been shepherding pilgrims to the Vatican basilicas and Museums and to shrines across Europe and the Holy Land for more than 75 years.

“Here at ORP we know that not everyone can actually physically participate in a pilgrimage but that doesn’t mean that their thoughts and their prayers can’t be brought there.”

On August 2, 2012, ORP director Fr. Caesar Attuire will be accompanying Mancini and a small group of pilgrims to St. Francis’ town of Assisi in Italy’s Umbrian hills. Mancini says anyone in Italy can join or send in their prayer intentions to be taken along on the journey.

The ORP has received thousands of prayers sent online or by mail from all over the world for the pilgrimage to Assisi and to previous journeys to the Marian shrine of Lourdes in France and to Our Lady of Fatima.

To send a prayer on pilgrimage, check out their Facebook page at "Jospers World" or on Twitter at @JospersWorld.

For more about the initiative, listen to Tracey McClure’s interview with Rosamaria Mancini: