When we think about the number of children that have participated over the years in our Armata Bianca prayer nests, we know the story begins with our Lady’s desires made manifest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Our Lady’s White Army began in a home with two moms and three very young children towards the end of the Jubilee Year.  We gathered appropriate symbols to help our children learn about the mysteries of the rosary.  In a short time, the tiny prayer nest found its proper home at St. Sebastian’s Chapel.  Friends joined us and very soon we had 20 children participating.  The St. Sebastian’s Armata Bianca is supported by families from many different parishes in the North Hills area of Pittsburgh.  We presently meet on First Fridays during Eucharistic Adoration, offering our intentions as a community, praying the rosary, and reciting the Armata Bianca prayers together.  The children in this prayer nest have ranged in age from infants to 17 years old.  Over the years we have had as many as 40 children attend the prayer nest with their parents or grandparents.  The children lead the rosary and the prayers, while the adult leaders teach the mysteries with icons, religious pictures, and symbols.  Those original symbols increased in number and for mysteries like that of the “Nativity” there is quite a display of teaching tools spread out.  We contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God with our symbols, the sign from the cosmos, the heavenly messengers, the pagan kings, Jewish shepherds, an ox and a donkey, and the Holy Family, and our icon, to teach that all of creation is receiving her King.  They see it in the symbols and the sacred art, and they understand.  Even the most timid of children move closer to peek at the teaching tools. 

Our Armata Bianca photos and videos remind us that our outdoor processions and May crownings have been truly a great delight made possible by our Lady.  The children know… mother Mary is present.  Honoring Mary’s motherhood and Queenship is a joyful physical experience with the procession and crowning.  In our prayer nest, the senses also encounter Christ Jesus present in the Eucharist and our Lady.  The children and adults turn their gaze toward Jesus in the monstrance on bended knees and tell him, “My beloved Father, My good Father, I offer myself to you.  I give to you myself as a present,” one of our Armata Bianca prayers of consecration.   Their meeting with Jesus and Mary are personal and maybe private, but they are empowered to offer their “yes” to our Lord and our Lady through the prayers of consecration.  Over the years our children have proved that they desire to recite a decade of the rosary, and sometimes at 2 ½ years old; they desire to understand the mysteries; they desire to learn the prayers; and they desire to say “yes,” they belong to Jesus through Mary.  Grace, poured out during the prayer nests, contains faith empowering the children to grow in wisdom.   In him, we have all received “grace upon grace.”


 

          In our 7^th year, we began three new Armata Bianca prayer nests.  We also took up the task of learning about the icons that coincide with the mysteries of the rosary with the help and blessing of our local Orthodox Church so that our Armata Bianca children could enter deeper into the mysteries. Our prayer nests travel the road to Emmaus so that our Lord can open our eyes with the use of icons, the rosary, and his Eucharistic presence, and we too can say; it is the Lord!  Journeying the road of the undivided Church by the use of icons, and with our rosary, has been a blessing for our prayer nests.  The children are seeing the mysteries with new eyes, the eyes of the soul.
 

The fruits from the Armata Bianca are clearly a blessing to individuals, families, and the Church.  Some children say their first Ave Maria’s in the prayer nest.  Some families have learned how to pray the rosary.  Other families begin attending daily Mass and find their young children have become more interested and are better behaved during the Mass.  It may be that our Lady is also nurturing vocations to the priesthood in some of the boys.  The fruit is what we will ponder in our hearts as we wait and see.  One of the most joyful blessings is the uninterrupted presence of new life from our Armata Bianca families.  The monthly attendance of the pregnant woman and the unborn child is a reminder of God the Father’s continuous gift of prayerful children.  At the Armata Bianca, we are reminded of Jesus’ command, "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these."  The Church receives from God the disposition to bring forth these little children and to bestow on them faith in God the Father and his Son given to us in the Eucharist.  The Armata Bianca prayer nest is a place where the children are brought to Jesus to pray, and God’s blessing is anticipated, but also the Church let’s herself receive new life from the “little children.”  Our prayer nest is placed under the gaze of the Most Holy Trinity, through Mary to Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to God the Father.  There is much more taking place than what is visible to the naked eye.  “All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

If you have any questions, or would like more information, contact the parish office at Info@SaintSebastianParish.org

The Armata Bianca icon: The Father Speaks