So here’s, in part, how I spent my summer vacation.
I will not bore you with too many details. In one sense there’s not much to say. I’m a middle-aged man: anything too exciting could land me in the hospital. I got a chance to catch up on reading, visit my son who is a ranger in Gettysburg, and head back to Notre Dame with Tom Healey and my brothers to watch our favorite soccer team, Glasgow Celtic, pummel Chelsea 4-1 as Touchdown Jesus watched with undoubted approval.
But the highlight of my summer occurred between my trips to Gettysburg and South Bend as I headed to Indianapolis for the 10th National Eucharistic Congress (NEC). In doing so I perpetuated a family tradition: my grandmother attended the NEC when it was here in Cleveland in 1935.
My role was as the representative of Saint Ignatius and a member of the 250+ person delegation from the Diocese of Cleveland. While there are plenty of sites that can speak to the structure of the Congress, I prefer to focus on a few observations I had in regard to the week.
John Stein S.J. of our Theology department was there and in his reflections on the Congress, recounted the description he heard of the event as “Catholic Woodstock.”
Maybe.
It was, nonetheless, a coming together of women and men of faith (and a sizable number of their children) from all over the country: pilgrims who became “companions” as we came together “with bread” (from the Latin: cum/com [with] panis [bread]). Here I saw the Church “Catholic” represented in all of our languages and ethnicities–and liturgical diversity. Each day began with the rosary and Mass. Each evening we knelt in adoration before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament to the singing of Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, Adoro te Devote, and Panis Angelicus…followed by praise music played by musicians the age of my kids.
The NEC was convened, organizers told us, because “the Church needs healing and the world needs Jesus.” There being no accidents in God’s Providence, it is significant that just days after the divisions plaguing our nation were dramatized in the attempted assassination of former president Trump, we Catholics came together–Democrats and Republicans, Catholic traditionalists and progressives, Dominicans and Jesuits–united in the Sacrament that makes us one.
Because for all the talk of healing the divisions in our country that came in the wake of the events in Pennsylvania, we understood that good intentions and human efforts are essential, but not enough: the return to the polarizing rhetoric we’ve witnessed in the last few weeks is certainly testament to that. If we are to heal, we can’t do it alone. We need God’s help.
So we prayed for healing in our nation and our families as we ourselves–thousands of us–waited in line for the better part of an hour to confess our sins, lest we be too concerned about the specks in our neighbors’ eyes while ignoring the beams in our own.
But I was mostly struck by joy–particularly by the young people there. Gradeschoolers passed out crafts they had made reminding us that Jesus loves us. There were teens from our diocese (and others) who brought all the posturing and noise and coltishness of their age–until it was time to pray. There were seminarians–hundreds of them–and young priests who joked and jostled and hung out with each other. And laughed. And so did the young sisters who reminded me of the young Ursulines who taught me 50 years ago dancing and laughing and being the “joyful Christians” Pope Francis reminded us that we need to be if we are to authentically witness to the Gospel.
In his encyclical, Redemptoris Missio, Pope John Paul II called for a “new evangelization” noting the need to consciously (re)present the Faith
Particularly in countries with ancient Christian roots…where entire groups of the baptized have lost a living sense of the faith, or even no longer consider themselves members of the Church, and live a life far removed from Christ and his Gospel. (RM # 33).
We are in the midst of a Eucharistic “revival,” literally a “living again,” in the United States. We members of the Cleveland delegation are called to be “Eucharistic missionaries” – to look for and implement ways to help foster greater faith in the Eucharist, the “Source and summit of Christian life.” Our job is to help you to better share the life of Christ with your family and friends, many of whom have fallen away from Him.
It is our hope that together we can breathe new life into our Church and our world.
It will be a difficult journey ahead–but we can take comfort in knowing we will be fed and strengthened by the Body and Blood of the very One we are called to share.
It’s easy to be discouraged when we look at declining numbers of baptized Catholics in the pews on Sundays or who live lives otherwise indistinguishable from people of no faith. Interviewed by German radio in 1969, then-Father Joseph Ratzinger–later Pope Benedict XVI–observed:
[I]t seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.
We’ve lived through a number of these “terrific upheavals.” But in Indianapolis I was privileged to see the buds of that “fresh blossoming” Ratzinger envisioned.
How did I spend my summer vacation?
Preparing for springtime.
A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.