In the days to come some 50,000 participants will gather in Indianapolis at the Lucas Oil Stadium for the 10th National Eucharistic Congress, the last in the United States having been held in Minnesota in 1941.
In his homily on this past weekend at St John the Evangelist Church, prior to the opening of the congress, Bishop Andrew Cozzens underscored the spiritual intent of the five-day gathering: to foster and embolden a revival within the church that can only be brought about by the Holy Spirit, by God’s grace, presence and power encountered by the faithful in the Eucharist above all.
It is the Eucharistic Lord who moves and speaks to the human heart, and which in turn speaks to others through witnesses in the family, parish life, in the movements, the workplace and daily commitments in the world.
Preaching only a day after the assassination attempt on the life of former President Donald Trump, Bishop Cozzens reflected on the assurance, confidence and peace that our Eucharistic faith brings in an often turbulent and even violent world. It is perhaps providential then that the congress opens this very week.
At the same time, it was predictable that not everyone in the United States would welcome the congress as just such an opportunity for renewal, reconciliation and evangelisation for Catholics.
Some commentators resent the way in which the national congress and its associated pilgrimages from Minneapolis, Connecticut, Texas and California risks diverting attention and energy away from a focus on the universal Synod on Synodality.
Others have painted the congress as politically charged or otherwise as a sheer indulgence of individualistic piety, rather than a true expression of Catholic community.
Take the opinion piece from Fr Thomas Reece earlier this week as an example. Writing in the National Catholic Reporter, Fr Reece claimed, “The Eucharistic Revival… is more about Benediction, where the consecrated bread is worshipped, than the Eucharist, where the community is fed… Christ is not made present on the altar table so that we can worship him. He is present so that we can eat him and become what we eat.”
Not only does this reading of the purpose of the congress overlook Pope Francis’ support for America’s National Eucharistic Congress and his explicit encouragement of adoration as a practice, “a prayer we have lost,” but it seeks to confect a sort of “zero-sum game” between personal devotion and public liturgy that is incoherent, as if the National Congress (or Catholics for that matter) are prone to choose one over against the other.
Such a dualistic framing of Eucharistic encounter is unfounded as Pope Benedict XVI affirmed in Sacramentum Caritatis, “The Son of God comes to meet us and desires to become one with us; eucharistic adoration is simply the natural consequence of the eucharistic celebration, which is itself the Church’s supreme act of adoration. Receiving the Eucharist means adoring him whom we receive”.
The living, personal relationship one develops and nurtures with Christ as his follower is never passive but by nature participative. The faith of Catholics is to be personal and ecclesial, and Christ is truly encountered, both received and adored, as Bishop Cozzens reminds us, so we might be “healed, converted, formed, and unified by an encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist—and then sent out on mission ‘for the life of the world’ (Jn 6:51).”
As the congress and those leading it are keen to remind participants and onlookers, the revival of the church has never been the fruit of human effort, but always a gift of the Holy Spirit who we can invite, pray for, and respond to, as disciples of the Eucharistic Lord.
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