<p>Is there a way to statically/globally request a copy of the ApplicationContext in a Spring application?</p>

<p>Assuming the main class starts up and initializes the application context, does it need to pass that down through the call stack to any classes that need it, or is there a way for a class to ask for the previously created context?  (Which I assume has to be a singleton?)</p>

Here's a nice way (not mine, the original reference is here:
http://sujitpal.blogspot.com/2007/03/accessing-spring-beans-from-legacy-code.html
I've used this approach and it works fine. Basically it's a simple bean that holds a (static) reference to the application context. By referencing it in the spring config it's initialized.
Take a look at the original ref, it's very clear.