“The hand of the Lord feeds us. He answers all our needs.”
We who attended the National Eucharistic Revival were blessed to witness the most important event of our generation for the Church in the United States. About 60,000 Catholics from all over the USA gathered in Indianapolis around our Eucharistic Lord. We heard incredible speakers and we were united in prayer with priests, religious, bishops, and cardinals that together numbered in the thousands. It was truly an experience of our universal Church on a scale only surpassed by World Youth Day.
But as good as all those things were, the most important reason we journeyed across the country was to come together as a nation around our Eucharistic Lord. We witnessed the extraordinary power of Jesus in the Eucharist, right there in our midst! He fed us, consecrated us, and renewed us. For five days, Lucas Oil Stadium was the world’s largest wicker basket, filled to bursting with the Bread of Life.
This Eucharistic Congress was a deep and profound experience of renewal of our American Church. We witnessed hope for our Church with our own eyes. We were led in prayer to repent before Jesus in the Eucharist. We asked Jesus together for renewal on behalf of our nation.
We are blessed that the Lord Jesus chose us and called us to be witnesses to this defining event. But we have not been made privileged witnesses for our own mere personal benefit. We did not earn this. We did not receive this because we were special. Jesus individually chose us to come, because he also individually chose us to carry out these graces into the world. Like the wheat of the field that becomes the Bread of Life, we have been gathered, formed in fire, broken, blessed, and now given to the Church as missionaries.
The Catholic Church in America will be forever marked by this event. When future generations study the history of our Church, they will read and learn about this 10th National Eucharistic Congress. They will learn how the Church in our country discerned a call from the Holy Spirit for revival “through, with, and in” Jesus in the Eucharist. And it’s abundantly clear that this is only the beginning of a grand movement that will span our lifetimes. The 11th National Eucharistic Congress has been announced for 2033, the Year of Redemption. Another national Eucharistic procession has been announced for 2025, culminating in a gathering on Corpus Christi Sunday in Los Angeles. We thought we were seeing the end of a three year process, when in reality we were seeing the beginning of a lifelong revival of our Church.
We are extraordinarily blessed in the American Church with material, intellectual, and spiritual abundance. Other countries struggle with lack of wealth, lack of faith education, lack of organization, lack of priests, or lack of religious freedom. We do not face crises like these in the USA – or at least, not on the same order of magnitude. “To whom much is given, much will be required.” There is little doubt we have been given this abundance in order to combat the great evils of our time and the godlessness that oppresses so many in our country.
Now, Jesus has called upon our Church’s abundance. He has come into our midst and fed ten times the multitude he fed in the Gospels. Ten times the more, then, is our mandate to overflow.
The power of the Lord Jesus! To take simple bread and make it our salvation. To take human hands and make them his own. To take a sports stadium and make it holy ground. To take our ordinary lives and make us extraordinary missionaries of the Eucharist.
Dear family, now is the time of renewal for our Church. “The winter is past, the rains are over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth.” We are entering a springtime – and springtime is the season of planting seeds. Jesus calls us from the Eucharist, like a beacon of fire, to join him in a lifelong Eucharistic procession. The world is starving for God and we have the only nourishment here among us. He says in our midst: “Behold, I make all things new.” Will we carry the seeds of Eucharistic renewal out into our country?
