TONOPAH, AZ – On August 11, 2021, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted solemnly blessed the new Our Lady of Solitude Monastery in Tonopah, AZ. Since their arrival in the Diocese of Phoenix in 2005, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration have longed for this day and have moved steadily toward this goal.
True to its name, Our Lady of Solitude Monastery is deep in the Sonoran desert and affords the nuns much solitude and silence. This is the first cloistered, contemplative monastery in the Diocese of Phoenix, providing local Catholics with a place of pilgrimage, prayer, and Eucharistic Adoration. It truly is an oasis in the desert!
True to their charism of Eucharistic Adoration in a spirit of reparative thanksgiving, the nuns are hosting a Forty Hours Devotion in thanksgiving for their new Monastery and for all those who supported them along this journey.
“In reality Clare’s whole life was a eucharist because, like Francis, from her cloister she raised up a continual ‘thanksgiving’ to God in her prayer, praise, supplication, intercession, weeping, offering and sacrifice. She accepted everything and offered it to the Father in union with the infinite ‘thanks’ of the only-begotten Son, the Child, the Crucified, the risen One, who lives at the right hand of the Father.”
– from Letter of Pope St. John Paul II for the 8th Centenary of the Birth of St. Clare of Assisi
