Agony, Archconfraternity of the

AGONY, Archconfraternity of the. - The work of the "Holy Agony of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Garden of Olives" was instituted in the second half of the last century by A. I. Nicolle, a priest of the Mission, at the Sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Valfeury, in France. The principal purpose assigned to it by the founder, who died in the odor of sanctity on June 21, 1890, is to pray for the peace of the Church, for the preservation of the faith and the cessation of the scourges that torment Christendom, and for the poor dying.

Approved by the Archbishop of Lyon, the work was, in 1862, by a brief of Pius IX, erected into a confraternity and enriched with numerous indulgences. Then by a brief of March 18, 1865, Pius IX gave the association the title and privileges of Archconfraternity for the Archdiocese of Lyon, with the faculty of instituting confraternities throughout the diocese. Leo XIII (brief of June 23, 1890) extended the faculty of aggregation to confraternities erected in other dioceses. Pius X and Benedict XV were generous with benevolence and favors toward the meritorious work, whose director general is the superior general of the Priests of the Mission.

The practices that the association prescribes or recommends to its members, ecclesiastical or lay, are: special prayers, the Holy Hour on Thursday evening, every day the Hour for the dying, and visits to them to dispose them to a good death. The Archconfraternity possesses a medal bearing the image of Jesus agonizing and of Our Lady of Sorrows. A bulletin, printed in Turin, is the official organ of the pious work.