WAUNAKEE — Some of the biggest moments of the Madison Diocesan Eucharistic Congress at St. John the Baptist Parish in Waunakee from September 29 to October 1 took place during the keynote talks.
The talks in English were given by Fr. John Riccardo, Fr. Craig Vasek, and Helen Alvaré.
The talks in Spanish were given by Fr. Agustin de la Vega, LC, and Andrés Arango.
Called and sent
Father Riccardo engaged most of the audience in the main church building by walking up and down the aisle and around those gathered with the aid of a wireless microphone.
His talk focused on the “end”.
He looked at the end of Mass in which we are “sent”.
“To do what?” he asked.
He said we are called to “engage,” but “how?” he asked.
He answered by saying we need to be “mobilized for mission”.
He said we need “unshakable confidence in Jesus” and added that we as a Church need to stop sounding like “losers”.
“Jesus is Lord . . . and that means nobody else is,” Father Riccardo said.
Jesus has “everyone in his hands and he is not nervous right now,” he added.
The second thing we need is the heart of Christ.
“Jesus just gave himself to us for a purpose, a number of purposes to be sure: To unite us to Himself, to fill us with supernatural strength, and to conform my heart and your heart to His.”
Father Riccardo said it’s the role of the priest to prepare people to be sent out to “do the ministry”.
“What is the ministry?” he asked.
“You can’t build the ‘City of God,’ but you can build for it,” Father Riccardo said.
The tools with which to do this are: Truth, beauty, goodness, dignity, character, integrity, forgiveness, and reconciliation, just to name a few, he said.
We can use those “weapons” against the real enemy, who is Satan and his minions.
Father de la Vega was giving a talk in Spanish at the same time in the old church building.
Be a ‘receiver’
While Arango gave the next Spanish talk, Father Vasek gave a talk in English in the main church.
“I’m going to tell you about the Eucharist, but to tell you about the Eucharist, I need to tell you about Jesus,” he said and added that we need to “talk about the person you love most — YOU. We’re fascinated with ourselves.”
He wanted people to ponder where they fall in the questions of “Am I a despairer?”, “Am I a presumer?”, or “Am I a receiver?”
The despairer thinks they can’t get to Heaven or receive God’s mercy. The presumer assumes they are going to Heaven no matter what. The receiver is a “real Christian, a person who sees what Jesus has promised because of what He has done for me and I have received what He has done for me. I have access to Heaven even though I am not there yet — my hope is like an anchor without a veil and I am going to get there someday.”
No matter where you are, Father Vasek said, the grace of Jesus is that “every day you have the opportunity to move into a place of reception, to move into a place of hope, to move into a place of salvation.”
Saying he came to talk about the Gospel, he said “The Gospel is about what Jesus has done”.
Judging someone to Hell because of their sins is not Gospel. Judging someone to Heaven because they are “awesome” is not Gospel.
“Both of those have to do with you and not with Him,” he said.
“The Gospel is about what Jesus has done and without Him, there is no Gospel.”
Knowing the Real Presence
Helen Alvaré said she thinks that “God is the most interesting thing there is and [I have] sought His face every day of my adult life”.
She hoped her talk would “draw us both closer to the God who is alive in our world, not just a 2,000-year-old memory, but as He promised, especially in the Eucharist, to be with us until the end of time.”
She said, “Many of us believe, but still struggle to fully embrace the Real Presence in the Eucharist and what it means.”
She also said, “Our overarching difficulty in doing this might be the difficulty in actually perceiving reality.”
She added, “The invisible, the transcendent is huge, is here, and is in fact bigger than the visible.”
Each of the keynote talks, both in English and Spanish, was introduced with a testimonial from a parishioner in the Diocese of Madison sharing their stories of encounters with the Lord.
All of the speakers were highly engaged and grabbed the attention of the attendees.
To view these talks in their entirety and find more resources from the Eucharistic Congress, go to madisondiocese.org/congress