Over the past three months, pilgrims around the United States have accompanied the Eucharist in local processions along four major routes to Indianapolis, where the National Eucharistic Congress will take place this week. Both the processions and the congress – America’s first since 1941- are part of the larger National Eucharistic Revival. The revival is a multi-year initiative sponsored by the American bishops as an invitation for Catholics around the country to renew their devotion to the Eucharist by uniting around it as the source and summit of our faith.
Since its formal launch on Corpus Christi Sunday in 2022, responses to the National Eucharistic Revival have varied. Over the past two years, I’ve encountered everything from laudatory articles about the revival’s importance, to disheartening studies about the declining belief of American Catholics in the doctrine of the Real Presence, to photos of large Eucharistic processions through America’s major cities, to reports critical of the significant financial costs associated with the National Eucharistic Congress, to questions about the U.S. bishops’ focus on the revival given other issues facing the world and the church. I was eager to experience some aspect of the revival firsthand – I wanted to be part of this historic moment in the life of the American Catholic church. I had seen and read plenty about it, but I wondered what to expect from actually attending an official National Eucharistic Revival event myself. I wondered what I would experience and what I would find.
On a hot Sunday this past June, I trudged with three other Jesuit scholastics up the hill from Creighton University to Omaha’s St. Cecilia Cathedral for the 10:30 am mass. On that Sunday, the cathedral hosted the Omaha segment of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. It was one stop on a procession route that had begun more than a month prior in San Francisco.
The cathedral was packed. Even arriving nearly a half hour before the start of mass, we took some of the last remaining seats in the second to last pew at the back. The crowded cathedral – full of people of all ages, many different cultural backgrounds, and including representatives of many different vocations in the church – conveyed an inescapable message as we quietly shuffled into our pew: the people of God are excited about this.
There was everything one might expect from such a special liturgy: thunderous music from the organ, shimmers of incense all around the sanctuary, a long procession of servers and concelebrants, hundreds of voices joining in song. Amidst it all, the reverence of the faithful sustained a deep atmosphere of prayer that somehow made one forget the crowdedness of the cathedral space.
Following the proclamation of that Sunday’s gospel of the calming of the storm, Mark 4:35-41, Archbishop George Lucas offered a thought-provoking homily inviting the congregation to consider one way that this story of Jesus and the disciples can inform our understanding of the Eucharist. His point: the Eucharist represents Jesus’s presence there in the boat with us.
In the weeks since, the homily has stuck with me. There can be great fruit harvested from studying the practically unlimited theological complexity of the Eucharist. Yet, I’ve found that
Archbishop Lucas’s words have been a helpful encouragement to recenter myself in the lived reality of receiving the Eucharist each day at Mass. Just like he was for the disciples on the stormy sea, Jesus is there in the boat with me in the course of my daily life.
We live in a chaotic world, one with more than its fair share of anxieties and pains beating against the sides of the boat. We are members of a church sadly beset by polarization, a fact that competing visions of the revival have made only too plain. Jesus is here in this boat with us. The National Eucharistic Revival invites us to recognize and remember that in and through the Eucharist, Jesus is sitting here in our boat, full of love, waiting for us to turn to him and allow him to calm the storms.
All of us can center ourselves in this wonderful fact and allow it to inform our faith, our Eucharistic piety, and our own call to evangelization. Regardless of whether or not we partake in a procession for the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage or gather in Indianapolis next week to attend the National Eucharistic Congress, we can and should unite as Catholics around the Eucharist because Jesus is indeed in the boat with us.
We may not always see clearly that Jesus is in the boat with us. In the hour long Eucharistic procession to Creighton’s campus church that followed the conclusion of mass at St. Cecilia, I did not actually see the monstrance a single time once it left the cathedral. Our seats in the back of the church placed us near the rear of the procession. Having previously attended only a handful of smaller Eucharistic processions in my life, I had been excited to be part of such a large one, and so I initially felt a bit disappointed at not being able to actually see the Eucharist in the monstrance. I worried it would not be the Eucharistic procession experience I had anticipated.
Jesus invited me to a different experience of his Eucharistic accompaniment in the procession. Though the monstrance was indeed far ahead of us and out of visible sight, Christ’s true presence was clearly there to see in the people of God. Looking around myself, I saw participants from every walk of life praying the rosary together as they went along, singing “Pescador des Hombres,” chanting Taizé songs and medieval Latin hymns read off of phones screens, and offering quiet personal devotions as they made the journey. Perhaps most significantly, those around me, while perhaps feeling similar disappointment at being unable to see the Eucharist or simple exhaustion from the hot sun beating down, seemed genuinely content just to be together praying.
As the procession passed along the sidewalks of a quiet American neighborhood on that Sunday afternoon, Jesus was truly present in faith of the people of God assembled there to worship and follow him. My brief experience walking part of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage reminded me that I’m better able to perceive him there when I gaze around and notice all of the others who are in the boat too. I experienced a revival that calls us to remember that we are all on a journey together, that we are a synodal church, and that Jesus reveals himself within that community.
The National Eucharistic Revival may not reinvigorate every Catholic’s belief in the Real Presence or solve every problem facing the American Catholic church today. However, that should not distract from the clear good fruit it is already bearing in the lives of thousands, fruit which I saw plainly visible that Sunday in the faith of all those coming together as the body of Christ to renew their faith and their devotion to the wonderful mystery which is the Eucharist. What I saw at the National Eucharist Pilgrimage last month was a broad spectrum of faithful Catholics eager to be in relationship with Jesus and follow him more closely. What I saw was the people of God responding to the Holy Spirit’s invitation to a renewed zeal for the Eucharist.
What I saw was thousands of people turning to notice Jesus sitting there in the boat with them and allowing him to speak those most gentle of his words: “It is I. Do not be afraid.”
Image: OSV News Photo/Dave Hrbacek, The Catholic Spirit
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