The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is launching a three-year National Eucharistic Revival with a mission “to renew the Church by enkindling a living relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist” and a vision of “a movement of Catholics across the United States, healed, converted, formed, and unified by an encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist — and sent out in mission for the life of the world.”
This effort will invite, inspire, catechize, and form all of us to have a deeper understanding, a greater participation, and a more loving devotion to the Lord in the Holy Eucharist.
Even before the pandemic, most Baptized Catholics were not attending Sunday Mass, and COVID has sadly accelerated the decline, although our local numbers of people in the pews have been markedly increasing lately.
If every Catholic understood and believed in the Eucharist, they could not stay away from Mass. To truly know and believe that the living Christ is present in His Word and in the Eucharist, that we participate directly in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and share in His resurrection at every Mass, that we receive the living Body of Christ in Holy Communion is to grasp the fundamental belief of our Catholic faith and to know the infinite love of the Lord in our soul.
I remember, as a young priest, having ongoing conversations with an evangelical pastor about John Chapter 6, which is the great Eucharistic discourse.
He viewed Jesus’ language here as merely symbolic, while I was attempting to explain the etymology of the original Greek, sarx, a gritty word meaning “flesh” or even “meat.”
Additionally, why would Jesus let many of his disciples leave Him over His Eucharistic proclamation if they had fundamentally misunderstood what He said about eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood?
This pastor has remained in my memory because at one point he said, “If I believed in the Eucharist as you Catholics do, I would be coming up the aisle on my knees to receive the living presence of our Lord.” The power of the Real Presence!
The need for a renewal
Because of repetition and familiarity, we can easily let the Eucharist and Holy Communion become so routine that these experiences of the Blessed Sacrament no longer fill us with wonder, awe, and gratitude. Mass can simply become a repetitive ritual which ceases to impact our hearts and convert our lives.
This Eucharistic Revival seeks to change all of that, as we seek the spiritual renewal which only Christ can bring in the Eucharist.
These national efforts to renew, increase, and deepen participation in the Mass, Eucharistic devotion, spiritual growth, and catechetical understanding converge very beautifully with the Go Make Disciples evangelizing initiative in our diocese.
When we experience the love of the Lord, when we know that Jesus traded His life for ours on the cross, when we understand His desire to abide within us through sanctifying grace, the Eucharist becomes the interpretive key to grasping the meaning of the Bible, unlock the great secret of the saints’ heroic charity, and to live as missionary disciples in the Church and the world.
Some highlights of the Eucharistic Revival include processions, catechesis, a diocesan Eucharistic Congress which will occur at the end of September 2023, and a national Congress in Indianapolis in July 2024.
I do not view these efforts as separate or apart from Go Make Disciples, but rather, as an integral part of evangelizing our people so that the vision of the Second Vatican Council will be more fully realized: “A full and conscious participation of the people in the Eucharistic sacrifice which is the source and summit of our faith.”
Coming closer
I encourage everyone to faithfully attend Sunday Mass every week, to go to weekday Mass if possible, to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, to invite your family and friends to church, to study what the Catechism teaches about the Eucharist, to prepare for Sunday Mass by praying over the readings beforehand, and pondering your prayer, work, joys, sorrows, and sacrifices of the past week, which you will spiritually place on the altar, along with the bread and wine.
This latter action reminds us that we offer our lives to the Lord in union with the gifts which come up the aisle so that we share in the sacrifice of the Son to the Father, which is the redemption of the world.
We can never forget that on the last night of His earthly life, hours before Jesus was betrayed, arrested, accused, imprisoned, and killed, He was thinking of us, not Himself. He was thinking of how He could best remain with His people in an intimate, efficacious, and transforming way until the end of time.
His answer is the Eucharist, the greatest gift we can ever receive.