Concerned about the increasingly secular culture that her teenage children would have to face once they graduated high school, Maria Woltornist, a Catholic mother of seven who lives in New Jersey, decided to start an apostolate for mothers to pray for their children.
Five months later, that apostolate has more than 250 members on three different continents, with prayers translated into six different languages.
“We want every child, every one of our children, grandchildren and godchildren to get to heaven, to be saints,” Woltornist told CatholicVote in a Jan. 16 phone call interview.
Woltornist said that when her oldest child, who is 36, was going off into the world, there was a sense of anticipation and hope about the life he was going to build.
“There was no such thing as gay marriage,” she said. “People didn’t walk around talking about what gender they were.”
But in the years that have followed, the culture has declined. For three days, she mourned as she thought about what her teenage children will face.
And then a friend who also has children called her. The two shared their sorrows during the phone call, and Woltornist suggested that they start a prayer group.
Woltornist said she was inspired by the model of the Seven Sisters Apostolate, comprised of groups of seven women who each commit to one hour a day of Eucharistic adoration for their parish pastor. Thus, the pastor has somebody spending an hour in adoration praying for him each day of the week.
Seven Mothers has a similar structure. Each mother offers one weekly Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament and during that Holy Hour, she prays each of the children, grandchildren, and godchildren of the other mothers in the group.
The apostolate also has a book with prayers for different circumstances that mothers face throughout their children’s lives.
Woltornist floated the idea to some other mothers who came over to her house that week. Before she knew it, nearly 50 women asked how to participate.
“I’m not tech savvy, right?” she said laughingly. “So I had names on an index card, an index card for each mother and the days they were available, and I put them all over my dining room table and I tried to fit them together like a puzzle.”
Before she officially formed the group, Woltornist asked for the blessing of her parish priest, as well as two bishops: Bishop Athanasius Schneider and Bishop Joseph Strickland, both of whom approved the apostolate in October 2025.
“Mother’s prayers and tears, united with the tears of Our Lady, pierce heaven and touch the heart of God,” Bishop Schneider wrote in the foreword to the apostolate’s prayer book. “The renewal of the Church and the true benefit for human society depend mainly on the increase of the numbers of true Catholic mothers.”
“Every Catholic mother should imitate Our Lady, the best mother, the most loving, the most merciful, the most sorrowful and most believing mother, the mother of mothers,” he added. “Let us ask Our Lord: O Lord, give us Catholic mothers, give us many Catholic mothers, give us many holy Catholic mothers!”
Woltornist said that mothers have already started reaching out to her about graces, experienced within their families, that they attribute to the prayers of the Seven Mothers groups — sick children recovering from illnesses, children being more open to the faith, and the easing of family crises.
Mothers who can’t commit to a weekly hour of adoration, can participate in other ways, Wolternist added, such as being on a substitute adorer list.
The power of the prayers, Woltornist said, is like a hidden giant — invisible to the world but pouring graces out upon all of the mothers’ children.
The apostolate, she said, is also an important source of hope.
“Praying [the children] will be strengthened to make a difference in the world, to be saints,” she said, “really gives us mothers hope in a world gone mad.”