Apostleship of Prayer Collection

The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network is a Pontifical Society, entrusted to the Society of Jesus, with the mission of mobilizing Catholics through prayer and action in response to the challenges facing humanity and the mission of the Church. These challenges are presented in the form of prayer intentions entrusted by the Pope to the entire Church. The foundation’s mission is inscribed in the dynamic of the Heart of Jesus, a mission of compassion for the world.

It was founded in 1844 (see th etimeline) as the Apostleship of Prayer. It is present in 92 countries and is made up of more than 22 million Catholics. It includes a youth branch, the EYM: Eucharistic Youth Movement.

In December 2020, the Pope constituted this Pontifical Society as a Vatican Foundation and approved its new statutes.

This archive represents an effort to keep alive the memory of this magnificent apostolic work, which was born from the heart of the Society of Jesus in a formation house for young Jesuits in France, but which quickly took shape and consolidated as a mission to reach out to the service of the mission of the universal Church.

In fact, ARSI preserves the material of the Apostleship of Prayer starting from its founding documents of 1844 and is currently accessible to researchers up to the documents of 1958 (Pontificate of Pius XII). If you are interested in consulting the documents preserved by ARSI, please make an appointment to reserve a place in the reading room.

For more detailed information on the archive held by ARSI, see the article by Sergio Palagiano (archivist responsible for the reorganization and cataloguing of the Fond) Exploring the Apostleship of Prayer Collection at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI): Between Archival Analysis and Research Perspectives in Engaging Sources: The Tradition and Future of Collecting History in the Society of Jesus (Proceedings of the Symposium held at Boston College, June 11–13, 2019) Edited by: Cristiano Casalini, Emanuele Colombo, and Seth Meehan.

Below is available a timeline to interactively navigate the founding documents of the early years of the Apostleship of Prayer, a presentation of the collection through images and the download of the inventories in PDF (ancient section with relative indexes, modern with the diffusion and national divisions of the Apostleship with relative indexes and the rich iconographic section).