Our Religion Team of Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Lonergan united to bring Pope Francis’s powerful and unprecedented prayer for peace in Ukraine closer to home with moments of prayer and silence in the garden of St. Mary’s Church. Below we see Second, Fifth and Sixth Years taking just a bit of time out of their day to reflect on the situation in Ukraine, pray for a peaceful solution and reflect on our relative security and prosperity. Mr. Lonergan and Mr. Gallagher were inspired by Pope Francis’s historic invocation of Our Lady of Fatima. Pope Francis prayed for peace in Ukraine in a ceremony Friday that hearkened back to a century-old prophecy about peace and Russia that was sparked by the appearance of the Virgin Mary to three peasant children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.

Francis invited bishops, priests and ordinary faithful around the world to join him in the consecration prayer, which opened with Francis entering St. Peter’s Basilica before an estimated 3,500 people and concluded with Francis sitting alone before a statue of the Madonna. There, he solemnly asked forgiveness that humanity had “forgotten the lessons learned from the tragedies of the last century, the sacrifice of the millions who fell in two World Wars.” Here are texts of The Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and Pope Francis’s homily.