A group of cloistered nuns in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, has been working overtime lately — for one of the most compelling events of the year, maybe even of their lifetimes.

The religious nuns known as the Poor Clares bake communion wafers to help support themselves and usually sell the wafers to about 200 customers across the United States and Canada.

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Recently, they have made 100,000 extra communion breads for Pope Francis’ visit to Philadelphia later this month.

The baking process is a precise three-hour ordeal in which the flour-and-water batter is cooked on a griddle embossed with religious iconography, then stamped with designs, moisturized in a humidifier and cut into the circular wafers. The hosts are then inspected, counted, bagged, packaged and sent off, as the Associated Press described.

“We are very excited,” a member of the Poor Clares, Sister Anne Bartol, told the Washington Times about making the extra papal mass wafers. ”The baking of the altar breads is the work we do to support ourselves, but it’s also a very special work. And we take care, extra care, in how we make them, making sure they are very good quality.”

The pope will visit the United States from Sept. 22-27. On Sept. 27, he’ll celebrate an outdoor mass in Philadelphia, which could attract 1.5 million people who make the pilgrimage to hear his messages.

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The Poor Clares are an enclosed community about 20 miles northeast of Philadelphia. The order was founded more than 800 years ago after St. Clare, the first female follower of St. Francis of Assisi. Francis, of course, is Pope Francis’ namesake.

The nuns never leave their monastery except for medical reasons, though they do maintain a website, conduct their communion wafer business by email, and welcome visitors to their chapel. But they have been granted special permission by their archbishop to attend the pope’s mass.

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It took two months of working overtime to bake enough breads for the Philadelphia papal mass. Other groups are preparing by baking wafers, too.

“We’re just grateful to be able to participate in this way with the pope’s mass,” said Sister Anne Bartol. “Some of us are going to get a chance to go” to the papal mass.

“We’re going to pray for everyone there,” she shared, “and we ask for their prayers as well.”