On the season premiere of “The Gloria Purvis Podcast,” Gloria speaks with Bishop Andrew Cozzens, who was appointed by Pope Francis to be bishop of the Diocese of Crookston, Minn., in 2021. Bishop Cozzens is the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, where on behalf of the bishops, he is leading a three-year National Eucharistic Revival that began this past June.
Gloria and Bishop Cozzens discuss the meaning of the Eucharist, the plans for the eucharistic revival and the importance of encounter in creating missionary disciples.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Gloria Purvis: What do Catholics mean when they talk about what is the Eucharist? How would you explain it to some of our listeners that maybe didn’t get a great catechesis on it, or are for the first time hearing this word?
Bishop Andrew Cozzens: The Eucharist is Christ’s greatest gift to his church. And the Eucharist contains the entire spiritual wealth of the church, and that’s because it contains Christ himself. On the night before he died, when he sat with his closest friends, he gave them this incredible gift, which would do two things that we can’t live without. One of them is to give us his presence with us, so that his life would continue with us always, and the other is to give us the opportunity to renew our own covenantal worship with him.
In the tradition, we speak about those as the Real Presence and the sacrifice. Pope Francis speaks so beautifully about this in his most recent letter on the liturgy, where he talks about what it means that we can participate in this real worship. He says, for us, a symbol is not enough. We need to really be there worshiping with Jesus and become one with him, which is what it means to be the body of Christ.
“The Eucharist contains the entire spiritual wealth of the church, and that’s because it contains Christ himself.”
GP: I reflect on my own encounter with the Eucharist, which is what brought me to the church, during eucharistic adoration. I was not a Catholic. I went to Catholic school, and the religious sister who taught us religion had us go over to the adoration chapel with her so she could pray.
It was in that silence in the presence of our Lord that I had a mystical experience: My body was consumed with flames, but it didn’t hurt. And in those flames, I just immediately knew that what was in front of me was real and alive and that I was called to union with that. [I said], “I’m supposed to be a Catholic.” I went home and told my parents that I’m becoming a Catholic.
And the goodness of the Lord is that they said yes. So at 12, I came to the church, and I was the only practicing Catholic in my family. There’s something about the knowledge that he’s real, that’s changed your life, changed my life. I’m hoping that through this eucharistic revival, it changes the lives of many others who can come and commune with the Lord. And I know that this is going to be a major event in the church in the United States—it costs around $28 million and culminates in a major event.
AC: The good news is that we’ve been able to cut the price in half. We’re getting that word out, but we’ve redone the whole budget. It’s going to be much more like $14 to $16 million. So we’ve been really grateful for some of the work of the new congress corporation. They’ve dug into this, and we’ve got real numbers now. So it’s going to be much less expensive.
GP: I know it’s going to be in stages, and the first year is diocesan. What happens this first year then?
AC: I want to make one comment about your encounter first because that’s so important. Pope Francis speaks about this all the time: We know that discipleship begins with an authentic encounter, the kind of encounter you had with Jesus and the blessed sacrament. When I speak to young people who are alive in their faith, I say, what happened? Eight out of 10 describe an experience like you just did in front of the blessed sacrament. There’s something about being in adoration for young people where they encounter Jesus, and they can see he’s alive. I think it’s the silence. They’re able to enter into the silence.
“For us, a vague memory of the Last Supper would be no good. We want to be present there. The real presence allows this encounter.”
Pope Francis says the liturgy guarantees for us the possibility of such an encounter. For us, a vague memory of the Last Supper would be no good. We want to be present there. The real presence allows this encounter. The Mass can allow this encounter.
GP: One of the things that I sometimes worry about in terms of the Eucharist is people forget it’s a mystery. And people say, “It has to be explainable in these concrete words.” But it’s still a mystery, and we have to accept that part of it. Sometimes there are things beyond human language, but it’s still true. How do we convey it?
AC: A mystery is something that can never be fully known. There’s always more to know about a mystery. And the beautiful thing is, it’s a mystery that can capture your whole life. This mystery has the power to not only transform us through an encounter but then actually teach us how to live a eucharistic life, which is a life of self-gift in imitation of Jesus’ gift. It makes me want to be able to give myself more and more with, for and in Jesus. It’s this mystery that will never be exhausted.
You can give quotes from every century about the real presence of Jesus in the universe. I can quote you St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Paul, our Lord himself. It’s always been the heart of the church, and the real presence has always been our belief. That belief got more refined when we got to St. Thomas Aquinas and the eucharistic controversies. We understood transubstantiation: a change in the essence of the thing, that the thing itself actually becomes his body, blood, soul and divinity. And that there’s no more bread there and there’s no more wine there. Even though it looks like bread and wine, the essence has changed. It’s perfectly consistent with what St. Augustine, St. Leo the Great, St. John Chrysostom believed. You can go back all the way through time to understand this great mystery.
GP: What was the impetus for the eucharistic revival? What was the point at which the bishops all said, “We’re going to do this”?
AC: This was Bishop [Robert] Barron’s idea. In the fall of 2019, we had that Pew study, which seemed to show that only 30 percent of Catholics expressed a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. Now, there were a lot of questions about that study, and we’re redoing that study to try to get to the real belief of Catholics. But everybody knew it pointed to a problem.
“If I know I’m God’s beloved—just what you experienced in that adoration: I am known by him. I’m loved by him—then I’m on fire for mission right away.”
Bishop Barron came up with this idea of doing a multi-year renewal project on the Eucharist that would involve the whole country. The diocesan year is really focused on leaders. We began that on June 19, 2022, with Corpus Christi processions all over the country. We’re trying to engage leaders through diocesan point persons, through apostolates. Right from the beginning, we wanted this not just to be a top-down event but really we wanted lots of apostolates to be engaged. To engage leaders in the revival, we want them to see themselves as eucharistic missionaries.
The second year of the revival will be the parish year. That’s where we want to reach those people who come to church but don’t fully understand the gift of the Eucharist. We want to use small group study, parish-based adoration and parish-based catechesis to reach those people who have a connection to the church. If we could set them on fire the way you were set on fire with your experience of the Eucharist, it would change everything for them.
That year then will culminate in what’s going to be the most exciting aspect of the revival, which is the National Eucharistic Congress. The last time we did anything like this was in 1976, in Philadelphia, when we had an International Eucharistic Congress, and we had some famous people there, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta and a guy named Karol Wojtyła, who was archbishop in Krakow, who two years later became John Paul II.
“That encounter and that experience of the church, united around the Eucharist—that can have lasting fruit.”
We’re hoping to have 80,000 to 100,000 people go to Indianapolis, July 17 to 21, 2024, a gathering of the American church. We want the whole church to be there. This idea that we would come together with our many cultures, with our many ages and generations, and that we would celebrate unity, we would experience a transforming encounter, and then we would be sent on mission—that’s going to be the focus of this event. We need to become like the early church and become missionaries again. The whole eucharistic revival is really aimed at that sense of a missionary spirit, which comes from the encounter. I’m a big fan of this paradigm, which is rooted in John Paul II’s theology: relationship, identity, mission. Our identity flows from our relationship, and our mission flows from our identity. The Eucharist is the place where we experience most clearly our relationship and where we know who we are.
And if we know who we are, then we’re automatically set on fire for mission. If I know I’m God’s beloved—just what you experienced in that adoration: I am known by him. I’m loved by him—then I’m on fire for mission right away. And that missionary conversion is what we’re seeking through the eucharistic revival. The last year [of the revival], we want to just help facilitate that. We want to give lots of resources to people to help teach them how to be missionaries in their daily life as they experience this fire.
GP: The last time I went to a eucharistic congress, it was transformational. The congress and the testimonies, the time in adoration and the fellowship with other believing Catholics really set our young adult ministry at my home parish in Washington, D.C., on fire. And we moved out into the neighborhood doing so many things. We were the first parish in that part of D.C. to have the Gabriel Project, which did outreach to women in crisis pregnancy. It flourished. The fruit of that congress was really palpable, noticeable, measurable, seen. So many of us more than a decade, two decades later are still involved in the church, still animated in some way.
AC: People sometimes question: Is a big event worth it? Yes. Ask anybody who went to World Youth Day in Denver. Ask the people of Denver. They all point back to something that happened there at that big event. We want to be about things that have lasting fruit. And that encounter and that experience of the church, united around the Eucharist—that can have lasting fruit.
