The bishop whose voice cracked. The bishop from Crookston, Minn., who stood before thousands of people on a Sunday morning in the House of Peyton transformed into the House of God, and said in the final moments of the final Mass, “And now the Eucharistic Congress has ended.” Who got choked up, the emotion of the whole experience coming through for just a moment.
A woman who confided to me over bratwursts and lemonades, regarding the revival: “America needs it. Whatever side you’re on. Everyone knows we need it.”
A congress attendee at the Indianapolis airport who said how wonderful it was seeing the bishops process out of Mass, all in white, like missionaries sent by the Holy Spirit to evangelize the world.
The overarching focus of the event was the “real presence”: talks, lectures, exhibitions, Masses, benediction, exhortations, musical performances, podcasts, panelists proclaiming Christ is truly present at the Eucharistic table of the Lord.
And then there was another real presence. The real presence of Christ in moments of unscripted honesty and truth and people just being kind of sweet.
Christ under the appearance of bread and wine, and under the appearance of people just trying to do their best and be Catholic and press forward with their lives.
A Divine Invitation
The National Eucharistic Congress, held between July 17 and 21 at the Indiana Convention Center and Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, was the centerpiece of a three-year Eucharistic Revival initiated by the American bishops in 2021. (The third year, taking place now, is called the mission year, in which Catholics are encouraged to “walk with one person” on a journey to faith and the church.) While there had been an International Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia in 1976, this was the first congress hosted by the U.S. Catholic Church in 83 years.
Outside of the crowds that gathered for papal visits, including World Youth Day in Denver in 1993, it was perhaps the largest gathering of Catholics on American soil in decades. According to the congress press office, the event included participants from all 50 states and 31 countries, speaking 53 languages.
The revival itself was spurred by a poll in 2021that indicated (correctly or incorrectly; people debate this) that an alarming number of Catholics do not believe in the “real presence.” According to the revival’s website, the event is the “joyful, expectant, grassroots response of the Church in the United States to the divine invitation to be united once again around the source and summit of our faith in the celebration of the Eucharist.”
And so upward of 55,000 people wearing orange canvas Eucharistic Congress knapsacks gathered in the heartland to hear about and experience the fundamental Catholic truth of God’s presence in the Eucharist. Sessions in the stadium bore a megachurch flavor, with the keynote presenters broadcast on large screens on either side of where they stood on stage. There were superb lighting effects creating visual backdrops ranging from red and orange stained glass to starry purple, while praise and worship music underscored speakers as they finished their presentations.
There were theological talks, history lectures and metaphysical exhortations on the Eucharist in breakout sessions and on panels: “I Object: Answering Fundamentalist Attacks on the Eucharist.” “The Martyrs of La Florida: A Great Eucharistic Defense in Our History.” There was a session for youth: “Finding Forever: Our Ache for Jesus in the Eucharist.” “The Miracle Hunter” shared stories of his worldwide search for the supernatural occurrences manifested through the Eucharist.
A man who plays Jesus on TV spoke to us wearing a T-shirt with the Flannery O’Connor line about the Eucharist: “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” Many people wore another T-shirt designed for the conference: “Body, Blood, Soul, Divinity.”
There was a chapel set aside for 24-hour adoration. There were holy hours and silent adoration and Benediction. If anyone doubts that Eucharistic adoration is a big deal for Catholics, particularly young Catholics, these days, their doubts would have been put to rest in Indianapolis. It seemed as if the topic of silent adoration was on everyone’s lips.
To light up the monstrance in appropriately dramatic fashion, the stadium’s lighting designer (I was told) studied the lighting of the gold idol in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
There was a Eucharistic procession in which 60,000 people marched through downtown Indianapolis, carrying banners, singing and praying the rosary. Sisters of Life and Knights of Columbus and the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, among dozens of other lay and religious groups, were there. Members of Regnum Christi sang the old standby “Here I Am, Lord,” by Dan Schutte, while other groups shouted “Viva Cristo Rey!” as they followed a flatbed truck turned into a mobile Eucharistic altar carrying Christ in the monstrance.
Paul Shelton, S.J., wrote for America’s website that, while he was processing with 1,000 priests, “people shouted their gratitude at us: ‘Thank you, priests, for letting us have Jesus.’”
In all of this massive spotlight on the real presence, I could not help but think: The real presence of the Eucharist was being made large at this moment, so that it eventually could become small again. The church was reminding us over and over how vital, life-transforming and salvific the Eucharist is (we put it on a flatbed truck, lit it up like in a movie) so we would want to take it in to fit inside our own body and blood.
It was something like a new romance or the rekindling of an old one: hiring a Piper Cub to write your girlfriend’s name in dramatic vapor trails across the sky… so eventually, after years together, you find yourselves a quiet, undramatic part of each other’s lives. The Eucharist perched at the top of a downtown war memorial, so that it becomes small and personal enough to slip into the heart. Metabolized and “invisible” except in the kinds of people it makes us.
Moments of Awakening
The discussion and exhortations throughout the conference were not solely about the real presence. The pro-life activist Lila Rose gave a talk comparing Joan Andrews Bell to Joan of Arc: Joan who went to federal prison for blockading an abortion clinic, Joan who was burned at the stake forrefusing to recant her visions.
Gloria Purvis, the host of a podcast at America Media, said on the last night of the congress: “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] attacks all of us because we are a family.” And, “No matter who’s in the White House, the governor’s house, the mayor’s house, Jesus Christ is always on the throne. We must obey God rather than men.”
The author Chris Stefanick, in a black T-shirt, gave a keynote talk sharing about the time years before that he tried to persuade a man to believe the church’s position on abortion. The man responded, “Yeah, but I just think my momshould have aborted me.”
It was a moment of awakening, Mr. Stefanick said, having marshaled church teaching as the initial sally into the life of someone who was immensely suffering. “We need to get back to basics,” Mr. Stefanick added. He quoted the words of Pope Francis: “The first thing on the lips of every single catechist should be ‘Jesus Christ loves you.’”
A group called Eden Invitation led a breakout session described as “exploring how discordant experiences of sexuality and gender can be united to the Paschal Mystery and Christ’s Eucharistic love.”
Mark Lemech of Detroit told me about Christ in the City, whose approach, he said, is to go into the city streets inviting people into faith. “Would you like a free rosary? Are you Christian, are you Catholic? Do you go to church?” They begin with these questions, he said, and then, “We challenge them to go a step further. ‘Come to my church, come to Bible study, come to my Mass.’”
In the Marketplace
Dozens upon dozens of stalls and exhibitions were spread out in a vast marketplace hall in the Indiana Convention Center. In more than a few corners it was a marketplace of strength, a marketplace of clarity, of vendors trying to help people stay true to what is Catholic and avoid what is not Catholic.
Aquinas Wealth Advisors helps investors align their portfolios with the U.S. bishops’ social justice priorities (avoiding investing in companies related to abortion, pornography, gambling, military contracting and other issues).
Catholic Owned advertises itself as a consortium of companies owned by people who are practicing Catholics in good standing, are faithful to the magisterium and pray the rosary daily. “Our company is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart” says its founder, Brooke Joyner, “and the work we do is in reparation for the blasphemies against her.”
Other groups advocating for strength and clarity and purity included The Knights of Columbus: “Protecting the Catholic family by strengthening Catholic men.” The Well-Ordered Family: “Reclaiming order and clarity in your family.” Templars: an order of young men focused on masculinity and a “heroic desire to do good—for the advancement of all that is worthwhile and of God.” Catholic Answers: “to explain and defend the faith.” Exodus 90: challenging men to realign their spiritual lives, freeing themselves from unhealthy attachments. (They do this through, among other things, 90-day regimens of prayer, cold showers, detaching from technology, exercise, dietary restrictions and fasting.)
There were Catholic comics, Catholic educational toys, Catholic colleges. Holy medals and priestly vestments and caskets. Boy Scouts and publishing houses and poverty programs. A Catholic doctors association, a nurses association, prayer apps. A Catholic miscarriage ministry, youth ministry, pro-life ministry, disability ministry. A Catholic peacemaking group.
Several religious orders had tables—among them Benedictine sisters, Carmelites, Marianists, Dehonians, Dominicans and several different orders of Franciscans. (My own order, the Society of Jesus, had a vocation table that five or six young Jesuits manned. I found myself surprised that, outside of that table, so few of us were present at the event.)
Next to the marketplace, volunteers in yellow hairnets worked an assembly line putting together food packages for the Million Meals Movement sponsored by a group called Helping Hoosiers Fight Hunger.
The congress was sponsored, at various levels, by Relevant Radio, OSV, the Knights of Columbus, the Augustine Institute, EWTN, Exodus 90, Legatus, the Franciscan University of Steubenville, the University of Mary and others.
There was a reliquary chapel, the Eucharistic Miracles exhibition, the perpetual adoration chapel, the Eucharistic Village. The Shroud of Turin replica and hologram. An exhibition about Blessed Carlos Acutis, a young man who created a website advertising the Eucharistic miracles all over the world and who will soon, after his canonization was approved in July, become the first millennial saint.
At one point, high school students from Cleveland spontaneously gathered under a bronze cross in the Eucharistic Village and chanted at the top of their lungs, “Let’s go Jesus, I love Jesus, we love Jesus, we love Jesus!”
One girl in the group told me that the congress “has been a sneak peek into heaven.”
She continued: “I’ve been going through stuff in my own life and thoughts from the devil entered my mind lately, but there have been talks [here] that have been opening my heart back to Jesus and casting those thoughts down to the pit of hell.”
Looking at who sponsored the congress and who had exhibition tables and the topics addressed at the congress and offenses against the Immaculate Heart of Mary and Jesus on the throne and would you like a rosary and casting the devil into the pits of hell and going to federal prison as compared to burning at the stake, the question arises: Was this a church, or was this the church? Was it merely one unique and like-minded segment of Catholics who reside among many different segments of the American church? Was this a particularly enthusiastic minority, the few kids on the yell squad in otherwise lukewarm high school bleachers?
Or were those present at the congress representative of the majority of the church—at least the ones still going to Mass and keeping the whole enterprise alive?
The U.S. church plans to spend about $14 million, all told, on the three-year National Eucharistic Revival. There have been the inevitable complaints about bishops spending $14 million on this. (To my thinking, this reflects an unfortunate utilitarian streak in the church that discounts the power and efficacy of culture, beauty and mass worship gatherings like this one.)
The closing Mass of the event, celebrated by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Filipino prelate who is part of the leadership of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, was accompanied by the 50-piece Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, all in black, which included 15 violinists. The Mass began with a 29-minute entrance procession with hundreds and hundreds of seminarians and deacons and priests and bishops, dressed in white. It was man after man after man processing in. And it hits home in a particularly vivid way as one looks down on a group of nearly two thousand men walking slowly through the stadium to take their seats in the front rows of a Mass: The church is almost thoroughly and completely led by men.
In his homily, Cardinal Tagle said, “Go and share Jesus’ tenderness to the weary and the suffering…. A Eucharistic people is a missionary and evangelizing people.” He then went on to preside over the final manifestation of the real presence in the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
This Is a Big Deal
Bishop Cozzens, the prelate from Crookston, Minn., spearheaded the revival. During the congress he knelt before the Eucharist and carried it through downtown streets in front of the 60,000 people and talked to it and held it aloft shining and Spielbergian and in several other ways signaled that this means something. This is a big deal.
And then, at the end of the final Mass, before the final blessing, he stood up and said, “And now our Eucharistic Congress has come to an end,” and he choked up.
This was the other real presence of the congress: Sweetly and spontaneously, and with no forced evangelical emotion, the bishop gets choked up and so manifests the kind of real presence that lives in a voice that cracks because what the man deeply cares about has ended. And in such a moment he is very easy to love.
The young seminarian from West Virginia in a crisp, black cassock (like many of the seminarians at the event wore) who said of the congress, “Maybe this will draw the wider church into unity. Young seminarians are asking themselves, ‘How are we going to build unity in the church and priesthood?’”
And saying that he wants to build a parish committed to good liturgy and the works of social justice. With such a parish, he said, it is impossible to have a lukewarm congregation.
That kind of real presence.
Or a man in the marketplace selling Catholic Lego sets. “You know, we had all these Lego sets [growing up] and we were going to Mass every week but there were no priests in Legoland. My hope is that one day that some kid says, I first started thinking about becoming a priest when I was playing with my Lego set….”
People kneeling cramped between the rows of blue seats on the hard concrete in the stands of Lucas Oil Stadium, silently adoring the host on the stadium floor below. Adoring beneath all those banners hanging from the rafters where it occurs to you that someone had to risk their life on a catwalk that seemed like it was 10,000 feet high to tell the world that the Colts won the AFC South Division. And below, something greater than the Colts is here: the body of Christ that resides in the gold monstrance flanked by two gold candles, and is also kneeling in the stands surrounding it.
A woman at the Eucharistic procession pushing her disabled son in a wheelchair: “People are nice,” she said. “People offer to help. It’s inspiring, all these people. People say the world is horrible. You know it’s not. Look at all the people that are here.”
Caroline Mondello of Prairieville, La., who, when asked what she loved about the congress, said, “The kindness of everyone, opening doors. Acknowledging a giant group of Catholics…united in one purpose.”
As reported by her young son, Caroline told her children, “How beautiful it would be if every person here gave a poor person one dollar. They would have 50 thousand dollars!”
All of this, the other “real presence.”
Was the Congress “a segment” of the church, or did it represent “the totality” of the American church? The question is ultimately a little inane, because it is a sociological question, one answered only through polls and studies and categories. And trying to understand the church through any socio-ecclesial category is like trying to use a slide rule to measure someone’s vital signs. It can’t be done.
This is what the church is: Wherever two or more are gathered in my name.…
The first International Eucharistic Congress took place in Lille, France, in 1881. The laywoman Marie-Marthe-Baptistine Tamisier pleaded with the clergy for 10 years to make it happen. Her desire was to counter the effects of the French Revolution and bring religion back into the public square in France.
One hundred and forty years later and an ocean away, one woman articulated succinctly what Marie-Marthe-Baptiste was trying to do in France, and was now happening in the United States. Jennifer Razo of North Lima, Ohio, over a bratwurst at a picnic table in the Eucharistic Village, said, “America needs [the revival]. Whatever side you’re on. Everyone knows we need it. It is part of a new movement. The climate is right for this revival, because we are broken.
“America and even people of faith are broken in spirit because of the conditions of the world,” she said. “As a nation I feel we’re broken. As a group of Catholics our spirit is wounded, we’ve hurting, we’re hanging in there, there’s nothing else to do but press forward.”
What got her there in the first place? “I need to be closer to Christ,” Jennifer said. “I just want to absorb every opportunity.”
And she was just there, with everyone else, showing up, pressing forward, present.
