Founding Story
This is the story of our founding as experienced and related by the co-founder Joe Valentic.
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One day I passed our parish priest in the hall at Church. He paused and asked me this rhetorical question: “Have you ever seen a priest who had devotion to the Eucharist and Our Lady go astray?” He smiled a knowing smile and walked away, leaving me to ponder this. Shortly after that, I was in a Catholic supply store. As I walked through the store, out of the hundreds of different prayers cards, the image to the left caught my eye. It was a prayer card titled: “Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament”. The moment I saw Our Lady and the Eucharist on the same card, I immediately recalled Father's question. I had never heard of this title before, but after my earlier encounter with my priest, I found this very providential. I picked the card up and headed to the register to buy it. I had completely forgotten why I came to the store and still don’t remember to this day.
As I approached the register, something else caught my eye. It was a beautiful deep red glass chaplet. It was called the Blessed Sacrament Chaplet. Again, I had never heard of this. After looking at it for a couple minutes I put it down. I remember thinking “Where am I am going to put this in my prayer life?” I was already praying the rosary and divine mercy chaplet. As I started to walk away, I felt a strong pull back to the chaplet. I picked it up and proceeded to the counter to buy both items.
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That night I went online to research the Chaplet. I discovered that it was originally created by the Blessed Sacrament Fathers, which is an order created by St. Peter Julian Eymard, who was given the title, Apostle of the Eucharist, at his canonization. As I researched more about him and found out that he was the one that gave our Lady the title “Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament”, which was also approved at his canonization. At this moment, both my wife and I knew this was no coincidence. My wife immediately suggested that we should make chaplets and share this devotion. I initially resisted based on how much we had going on in our lives with a growing family. However, I was drawn to continue researching about St. Peter Julian and the chaplet. During my additional research, I came across a beautiful red Swarovski crystal chaplet online, with an antique first Holy Communion medal. We bought the chaplet.
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Once I received the crystal chaplet, my wife and I looked at it and saw it was a perfect model we could use to make chaplets. We also noted that the antique medal was engraved with one of our daughter’s birth dates on the back. I went back online to thank the company that made it. When I opened their site, under the picture of the chaplet, was a note that read “SOLD -Thank you Joseph, we will never make another one like this, we only make one of kind items.” After that statement, we knew it was time to start making chaplets. That would not be the last sign we would receive to start this apostolate. As we started to work on designing our chaplets we needed a medal. Another providential internet search would result in finding a medal that had one side with an image of Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament and on the other side, an image of St. Peter Julian Eymard holding a monstrance. This providential find would become the permanent medal design for the chaplets we make.
As we continued to pray about what to do, we received a final sign we could not ignore. Pope St. John Paul II, would declare that coming year, to be the Year of the Eucharist. That was the final sign we needed to launch OLMBSA.
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We officially launched the apostolate at a local conference called the Lenten Symposium, run by the Holy Trinity Apostolate, that was founded by Servant of God Fr. John Hardon. The president of Holy Trinity, Barbara Middleton, was incredibly gracious and not only guided me on the formation of an apostolate but offered to have us launch it at the Symposium. She also gave me the opportunity to speak at the conference. We came to that conference with about 700 hand made chaplets. We sold out! Thus began Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament Apostolate.
Since our founding, we have limited our focus to hand making chaplets and going to local conferences to keep this manageable for our family. We did this up to the period of covid when all conferences stopped. During this period, we took a pause with promoting the apostolate. However, we never stopped praying about what the Lord wanted us to do with it. We always knew there was more of a plan. Over the last year, as we prayed about this, it become clear that it was time to relaunch this, but not as a limited family apostolate. For such a time as this, we believe it is time to relaunch the apostolate with the intent of building a full-scale organization that can take the Blessed Sacrament Chaplet, the teachings of St. Peter Julian and devotion to Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament to the world.
As the founding of this apostolate followed some very providential signs, the relaunch also had a couple signs. The day that we officially completed the materials to begin our relaunch and sent them to some possible supporters, turned out to be the feast of Pope St. John Paul II -This was completely by providence. Within minutes of realizing it was his feast day, I received an unsolicited text from the very priest whose question launched this whole process. I had not talked to him in at least half a year. We are thankful to God for giving us all these supporting promptings to shore up our faith, for such a time as this.
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