The following is the text of the speech delivered by Gloria Purvis, the host of America’s “The Gloria Purvis Podcast,” at the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis on July 21. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I want to talk to you about a eucharistic encounter I had as a little girl. First of all, I didn’t grow up in a Catholic family, so you might be saying, “Well, how did she have this eucharistic encounter?” Well, in Charleston, S.C., where I’m from, my parents were very interested in making sure their children had a good education. So, although they weren’t Catholic, they said: “You know, those Catholics have education locked down. We’re sending our kids there.”
My sisters and I all went to Catholic school from first to 12th grade. The school, along with our parents, wanted us to have a good education and also know how to behave and comport ourselves. But this one day, for whatever reason, in my seventh-grade class, we kind of got a little bit unruly and took advantage of the trust and had a food fight. It was fun, but I wouldn’t recommend it because of what happened after.
Even though we had this food fight, we were still very good kids, and we were like, “It’s not fair for the janitorial staff to have to clean up after us.” So we went and cleaned up everything, and we thought we were good, right? Wrong. After recess, after lunch, we had religion class with the principal of the school, who was a religious sister. Now, remember, I wasn’t Catholic then, and this is when I first learned that Catholics believed in public confession, because one by one, Sister called us by our name, and you had to stand up when an adult spoke to you. So she called me, “Gloria.” “Yes, Sister.” “Did you participate in the food fight?” “Yes, Sister.” “Sit down.”
She went through the whole class. We all admitted it, and she was fit to be tied. She said, “Children, this is not acceptable, so we’re just going to have to go over to the church.” Now, I attended the cathedral school in Charleston, S.C., so right across the parking lot was the cathedral church, and they had a lower church, which was the crypt church. So we marched in a single file over into the crypt church, and we were all sitting there quietly while Sister was on her knees in front of the monstrance, working it out with Jesus. I just remember seeing her from the back.
She was like, “Lord, you put these children with me.”
We were all very quiet because we wanted to live.
But I remember in that silence in front of the monstrance with our Lord exposed, being completely consumed in flames, I knew that my body was on fire, but it didn’t hurt. I still can feel it all these decades later; it’s still so fresh. But in that moment of being consumed in those flames, I immediately knew that what was in the monstrance was real, was alive.
And I was changed.
So a couple of days later, Sister comes back to my class. She says: “I gotta get all the Catholics together. I gotta start preparing you for confirmation.” And I ran over to her, and I was like, “Sister, Sister.”
And she was like, “Yes, Gloria.”
I said, “I think I’m supposed to be a Catholic.”
Do you know what she said?
“You have to go home and get your parents’ permission. You just can’t come in here and say you want to be a Catholic.”
Respecting the parents’ authority—I appreciate that. But when I went home, I didn’t do what she said. I didn’t ask for permission. In my 12-year-old voice, all proud and sure, I said to my parents, “I’m going to become a Catholic.” I remember my father looking at my mother and saying, “What is she talking about?” And she’s like: “Don’t worry. I got this. Oh, you’re going to become a Catholic?” “Yes.” She said: “O.K., you’re going to go to Mass every Sunday, every holy day of obligation, you’re not going to eat meat on Fridays and you’re going to pray the rosary. Got it?” “Got it.” And so that’s what I did.
It was a blessing to be in a family that, although everybody else wasn’t Catholic, they supported my faith, and my mother was very practical. Nobody ate meat on Friday because she wasn’t cooking twice.
Signs of our unity
But it was also later in life, I had another experience during the holy Mass where you say, “I believe in the Lord, the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life.” And I had what I can only call a little mini-chastisement, which I won’t go into right now. But after I had that experience of the Lord holding the mirror up to me, I had a renewed fire for what the church taught and why, so I was seeking and reading my Scripture, and I came across again [a passage] we read all the time, but something really stuck with me and still strikes me to this day. Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness.’”
There’s a profound truth about who we are, not only in relation to God, our common ancestor, but in relation to one another.
Because if we’re all made in the image and likeness of God, that means we are brothers and sisters, one to each other. We are one human family.
This is God’s word. This is God’s truth.
There is that unity that is real because God spoke it.
And there are other signs of unity, visible signs of unity that I think about with the church. I think back to when I was in third grade. This is the very first Mass I can remember. I just remember all the sights and sounds and smells, and it just took me in how we were standing at the same time, kneeling at the same time, sitting at the same time, speaking in unison. The children were the lectors at the Mass and the altar servers, so I really felt so a part of it.
Another sign of unity of the church [is in] Matthew 16:18: “And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”
A sign of unity is our leadership, the pope. That is something special about us. That is the sign of our unity.
And remember, God said we are family, right? We are made in his image and likeness. There’s something else that we believe as Catholics that’s another sign of our unity. It’s that one family, whether living or dead or in heaven, the communion of saints. We should think about that. We have, those of us on Earth, the church militant. We’re alive, and we’re battling against the world, the flesh and the devil, and we’re hoping to make it to heaven. Then you have the church suffering, those souls in purgatory, who need to be cleansed a little bit more before they can have the beatific vision. And then the church triumphant, the holy ones in heaven.
There’s something that’s so beautiful, if you think about that; that we have a family bond that exists in life and in death. That just gets me very excited that we have this. And this is so true about the faith. Do we think about that? Do we think about who we are and that we are not alone, and we have this relationship, one to the other, as believers, right in this body?
Signs of Disunity
But I [also] need to talk about some of the signs of disunity.
We talk about the pope being a visible sign of our oneness. It is disunity when we reject the pope. We step outside of the church. We step outside of how God ordered our church.
We are here. We love the Eucharist. We are happy to have Mass and adoration. All of that happens under the authority and permission of the Holy Father. Let us remember that.
I had the blessing of being able to meet the Holy Father in Rome. I was part of a delegation from America Media that had a two-hour sit-down interview with the pope. And I must tell you, I just don’t think we know who he is. I don’t think we understand how much he longs for our bishops and priests to just have the heart of a shepherd, to go to the sheep, to tell them they are loved by the Lord and to accompany them in their walk, in their struggle.
[There’s] something I haven’t really talked about publicly, but now I’ll say it with you. When I was there, walking over to the pope’s house, Casa Santa Marta, as we were walking back behind everything, I saw something in Latin that indicated there’s a site where Peter suffered, and I was going to try to sneak off from the group to go look. But I heard a voice say: “No, Gloria, go see the current Peter in his current suffering. He needs our prayers.”
He needs our prayers. We must know that all of Hell is unleashed against him because he is our chief shepherd. He is the Vicar of Christ, Christ’s representative on earth. So if you don’t like him, pray for him. Fast for him. But do not reject him. Because you set yourself outside of this unity.
Another sign of disunity: Let me just say we reject Christ when we prefer idols of temporal power. And I’ve seen that, and I’m seeing that, where we put political party allegiance ahead of allegiance to Christ. We can talk about how, “Oh, this party or that party is so good and so great and all those people over in this party or that party aren’t really Catholic.” Stop it.
When we have been baptized, we are part of this church. We may not act right, but it doesn’t mean we aren’t Catholic, unless we reject the church.
And we do, I must say, in our behavior, when we prefer the company of men to that of God. Then we’ve fallen away. We’ve rejected Christ. We need to change that. We can’t say, “Oh, you know, this political party’s doing this, this and this,” and when the other political party clearly says something that is against what we believe, when they then take on the language of not choosing or loving or respecting life, we have to rebuke them. Some people say, “Oh, well, that other party is worse.” But if they are taking on the language of the evil one, they are worse, too.
We have to recognize that we cannot compromise our beliefs and our values. For what? No matter who’s in the White House, the governor’s house, the mayor’s house, Jesus Christ is always on the throne. Remember that. We must remember the Apostles in Acts 5:29: “We must obey God rather than men.”
We have to remember in Acts 5:41 that after they were flogged and ordered to stop speaking in the name of Jesus, what did they do? Scripture says: “So they left the presence of the Sanhedrin rejoicing that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name, and they kept on preaching in his name.”
That is our model. Let us not cheer for humankind that is rebelling against God. No, we love the Lord. Let our words and our actions show that they are together, that we have integrity. Let us not be afraid of what may come. We say the creed that we believe that God created all things, visible and invisible. Well, act like you believe it. Do not be afraid of what may come. We love the martyrs. It seems like [we do] until we might have to be one.
Let’s not be fair-weather friends.
Now, another sign of disunity that is a direct rebellion to God’s word in Genesis 1:26 is racism. Racism is an affront to God’s declaration about humanity. It says God made some of us in His image and likeness but not all of us. Racism is a lie. It says the devil won that battle, but it contradicts what God said in Genesis 1:26. It says, “God, you made a mistake when you said that man is made in our image and likeness.” He didn’t qualify it.
Racism, this ethnic hatred, this racial hatred, says: “No, God, not everybody is made in your image and likeness. They’re not all worthy of dignity and respect.” Stop the deception. Reject the devil’s lies and temptation. We must get away from this idea that racism, when we talk about this sin, only attacks one group. No, it attacks all of us because we are a family. Those of us deceived by it are behaving beneath our dignity as God made us. Those of us who are the victims of it are suffering in a way that shows that people treat us beneath who we are. No, we are one human family, and we, as believers, thanks be to God, have the ability to make repair for these moments of disunity.
We have the ability to look at these things that are wrong, even if we didn’t do them ourselves. [Some might say,] “Why? I didn’t do that.” I say: “You believe in Christ. You follow Christ.” Did he do any of that? Yet he got on the cross and died for you. How are you going to say you won’t make any repair or do any atonement for the brokenness in this world? How can we reject being Christ-like? We have the opportunity to follow in the steps of our Savior by making repair. And we should remember, if nothing else, that sin is chiefly an offense against God, whom we love. That should be motivation enough to say, “No, Lord, let my sacrifices, let my prayers, my almsgiving, my fasting, be a balm to the marks against your face, the harm to the body of Christ.”
Now, some people may say, “But Gloria, if you believe all this, how come you’re so Catholic?” Why am I so Catholic? Because what [the church] teaches is true. Her founder is Christ, and I believe that. And no matter the storms in the church, I’m like a barnacle on the side of the church, and nothing is going to separate me from her. Nothing.
So I beg you, remember the signs of unity. Repent for the signs of disunity. Let us come together, motivated by a great love of God, and magnify him through our love, through our willingness to take on acts of repentance for others, to love those souls in purgatory who might be sitting there because nobody’s doing these acts of repentance for them when they were involved deeply in the sin of racism. For some reason, that’s the one sin people like to ignore.
No, you love God. We can do this. We’re going to mend the bonds of the human family. Let us go out and be more joyful in our evangelization. Let us be more open in our evangelization. Let us not be afraid, and let our witness to who we say we love penetrate all that we do and say and all that we are willing to undertake for the glorification of the Lord and the growth of his church.
One last thing I want to say: The very first night of adoration, I was overcome, and I just was crying with my hands up. And I want to give you a sign of unity, how we need to be with one another. A woman I did not know embraced me and was singing the songs in my ear. She didn’t ask me what Mass I went to. She didn’t ask me how I voted. She just saw that I was a woman deeply in love with the Lord, as she was, too, and she embraced me. Her name is Letty, I believe. I just want to say that is how we also sow that unity. We love without qualification. We walk with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we keep each other upheld and motivated and loved instead of feeling isolated or judged.
So I just want to encourage you. I know you love the Lord, and I also want to say a word to the people who aren’t here, who were very upset that there is this Eucharistic Congress. I wish you were here. I wish you would come and love the Lord. And if you think I’m a Judas, don’t let me be in the way of you being with Christ. Don’t let Judas run you away from Jesus. You should be here if you love the Lord. You should be here even if you don’t like how we’re doing it. You should prefer God’s company, even if you don’t like how we’re doing it. God’s company should be enough.
I want to say that to you who are out there who are maybe upset about this, humble yourself and honor the Lord and follow him in the way that you will. But don’t be upset with the rest of us because we choose to love him this way. There are many expressions of love for the Lord. Do yours. We do ours. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s plenty enough room for all of us to love the Lord in our special way, as long as we are faithful. And so I just want to leave you with that, my brothers and sisters. Please let us go out renewed, refreshed, repenting and loving the Lord. Amen.
America was at the 10th annual National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. Find additional essays and reflections here.
