“The Ten Ingredients for a Eucharistic Revival”
Want a recipe to revive faith in the Real Presence? Here it is.
Homily for the Traditional Latin Mass at the 10th National Eucharistic Congress
Thursday, July 18, 2024, Holy Rosary Catholic Church, Indianapolis, IN
Introduction
We have been preparing a long time for this National Eucharistic Congress, this Eucharistic Revival we are observing here in the United States for these three years and beyond. But it cannot simply remain no more than a happy memory. It must be something that is renewing and revitalizing for the whole Church and our country. Nonetheless, it is a historic moment.
The Eucharist: Tether to the Church
As I have reflected on the events leading up to this Congress, and the Congress itself, and what we need for a Eucharistic Revival, my mind keeps returning to a memory that I have from when I was a very young priest. A freshly minted priest out of the seminary in my first assignment, forty-two years ago now. Young adult ministry was emerging on the horizon as a new area of ministry that needed to be addressed. I was very excited about forming young adults in the faith. I still remember a couple in the young adult group that I started who approached me—they were engaged to be married, and they wanted to begin their preparation for their wedding and for their married life together as husband and wife. It was a great joy for me to accompany them through the marriage preparation process and celebrate the sacrament with them.
But they had both strayed from the practice of their Catholic faith, but then returned. They told me the story about what it was that brought them back to their Catholic faith. When they first met and were starting to go together, they had each gotten away from practicing the faith but then began attending a local community church, one that was actually founded just a few years before I was sent to this parish. It actually siphoned off a number of parishioners from that parish. They told me that one of the Sundays they attended services there was a Sunday when they were having a communion service. I still recall them telling me that, when they went to receive communion, and held a cracker in their hand, they realized, “this is not the Eucharist—the Eucharist is in the Catholic Church.” And that is what brought them back. What is insightful for me is that they were at a church service and so were not talking to each other when this happened. But they each had that exact same thought at the same time independent of each other.
The Eucharist is what keeps Catholics tethered to the Church. No matter how far they stray, no matter how far they wander off into other religions or even wander into a life of sin, if they have Eucharistic faith, they will always be held by a tether to the Church. They will always know that Jesus is here in the Catholic Church through the Most Holy Eucharist. It is that lifeline that keeps our people tethered to the Church, just like the lifeline of an astronaut in a spacewalk, that keeps the astronaut tethered to the spacecraft.
Necessity of active participation
How do we inculcate this Eucharistic faith? There is so much to be done. I think it comes down to what we call “active participation” in the celebration of the Mass—in the fullest sense of what that means. The term, of course, was introduced by Pope St. Pius X in his apostolic letter Tra Le Sollecitudini. He wanted Catholics to learn the Gregorian chants in Latin so they could sing the Mass together and not sit as spectators at Mass—to be involved in the action of the Mass. The Church began building this sense of active participation. Of course, it was one of the principal teachings of the Second Vatican Council, which gave this principle a new thrust and importance. But I think we took a detour at one point about what this really means.
The words in Latin—as those who study theology know—is not “participatio activa,” but “participatio actuosa.” It underscores the interior participation in the action of the Holy Sacrifice of Christ in the Mass. I recall a time when I was young when all the emphasis was actually placed more on the interior life. Externals were inconsequential. They were seen as secondary or maybe even unnecessary, maybe even a distraction. They were just externals, not the real thing.
Now, however, I think we took a detour in the opposite direction. Many people understand “active participation” in terms of what people do at Mass, regardless of the interior life and of the ongoing conversion to which Christ calls us. The most important thing is that everyone be doing something. At times I’m even tempted to think that, for some people, the object of our worship is active participation rather than God!
Either way, these contrasting detours manifest a certain dualism—a dualism that is just expanding more and more in our secular culture even to a point now where there is a separation between one’s body and one’s identity. Likewise, we now make a separation between the interior life and the external. They are definitely two different things; yes, there is a distinction. But the whole point of externals is to create an environment in which we can foster the interior life, that ongoing call to conversion to which Christ leads us. And when we come from that place of faith, it will manifest itself in the externals—thus, the importance of beautiful liturgies, and beautiful music, and beautiful churches in which to worship. All of that is a part of active participation.
Ten ingredients for Eucharistic Revival
But there is more to it than that, in the fuller sense. So, I want to give to you today my Ten Commandments to Eucharistic Revival for every Catholic. Now, I know there are discussions on what needs to be done at every level of the Church, as an institution and other policies, and so on and so forth. But what I want to talk about is what each individual can do to bring about a Eucharistic Revival. Actually, I don’t really like calling them commandments, because when it is coming from a place of love, it doesn’t feel like a commandment. So, I would rather call it the ten ingredients that go into the recipe for Eucharistic Revival. Sorry, I’m Sicilian on both sides of my family, and it’s a Mediterrean thing—we just look at it this way, everything revolves around food. So, these are the ten ingredients that go into the recipe to produce a delicious Eucharistic Revival.
In church
First of all, externals do have their place: participation at Mass. The first area in which these ingredients fall is what we do at Mass, inside the walls of the church.
1. Participation in the liturgical action
The first ingredient, then, is “active participation” in the immediately obvious sense: participating in the prayers and in the singing and so on when we are at worship, not just sitting there as a bystander. And this applies to whichever form or rite of the Church we are worshipping in, each in accordance with that form or rite.
2. Silence
The second principle within the walls of the church is recovering the sense of silence. This is perhaps what disturbs me the most, the din in our churches before and after Mass. I find it perplexing, indeed disturbing, to find more silence in a movie theater before and after the film runs than in church before and after Mass is celebrated!
I’m old enough to remember a time when people entered church before Mass and would take time to, yes, pray. They would pray before Mass. It would be quiet in church. And after Mass ended, once again, they would pray, giving thanks to God for the gift they received. Now it seems, I’ll be honest with you, even in traditional circles where I celebrate Mass, it seems as if, as soon as “Ite, missa est” and “Deo gratias” is said, people can’t wait to break out into chat, right inside the church. There’s a place for that and a need for that, but that place is not inside the church. So there is a huge need to recover a sense of silence, which sensitizes us to the sacred. When one experiences the sacred, there’s no other adequate response except silence.
Many years ago I heard a story on the radio about forest guides taking people into the forests of California to admire our famous redwood trees. They spoke about how these trees are majestic. They’re ancient, hundreds and hundreds of years old. They are so majestic and impressive that, the guide recounted, the people are reduced to silence before them. This is silence for the beauty that the Creator has given us. So what about silence before the beauty of the Creator Himself? We know from the mystics that God speaks to us in silence. Yes, in His Word, too, but it’s those moments of silence that most touch our hearts and dispose us to hearing Him when He speaks.
Immediate preparation
There are also ingredients in this recipe that have to do with immediate preparation for Mass, things to attend to already at home, as you’re getting ready to go to Mass.
3. Dress
So, you’re getting ready to go to Mass: what are you going to wear? This is something else we’ve gotten away from. Yes, it sometimes happens, because of a particular circumstance, that you might not be able to dress properly. But that should be very much the exception, because the way we dress is an external that manifests an interior disposition. The clothes speak about, or remark upon, our attitude toward the one to whom we are present.
Later on in my life as a priest—still a relatively young priest, but not newly ordained—I was in residence at a parish and I had a job working in the Chancery office. There was a woman at the parish who also worked at the Chancery, an African-American woman, who had grown up in Louisiana. She would have grown up before and during the civil rights movement, so they were poor and on the margins of society. But she said everyone had their Sunday best. As poor as they were, they had their one set of clothes that they would use for going to church on Sunday. That’s coming from a place of love.
4, The Eucharistic fast
Something else to help give us some immediate preparation: how zealously do we observe the Eucharistic fast? Yes, Pope St. Paul VI reduced it to an hour, after Pope Pius XII reduced it to three hours, because it was common for many Catholics not to receive Communion. There was a need to encourage frequent and worthy reception of Holy Communion. We should not see an hour of fasting, though, as an ideal or the standard to aim for. It’s more like the minimum standard. Again, this is coming from a place of love. We want to prepare already before we go to church. We’re preparing to receive our Lord. So we should strive for more, when possible even to keep the fast from midnight, which is of ancient origin, or if not, at least a three-hour fast whenever that is possible.
Ongoing preparation
The third area has to do with ongoing preparation for Mass, or perhaps we could say remote preparation.
5. Penitential discipline
I spoke about the Eucharistic fast, but what about fasting in general? What about penitential discipline? Again, the Church lightened up on the requirements for penitential practices not because it is no longer important, but rather because the Church wanted people to freely choose to observe penance rather than simply go through the motions because it’s a rule. And even the Friday abstinence from meat, which is the minimum one could observe in terms of penitential discipline throughout the year, is not a practice that was just simply “dropped.” Pope Paul VI never said this in the Instruction Paenitemini which he issued in 1966. And likewise the U.S. bishops, when issuing their own norms on the implementation of this Instruction in 1967, encouraged our people to continue fasting from eating meat on Friday, but by freely choosing to do so, rather than out of a sense of juridic obligation. They also encouraged them to take on some other form of penance or work of charity on Fridays as well.
Again, the observance of Friday fasting is also of ancient origin. We do penance on Friday because it’s the day of the week that our Lord died. But we need to do it with the right spirit. I can understand the concerns at the time. A priest in the diocese I am from, who is about ten years older than I, once told me a story about a bishop’s housekeeper who, when the Church’s penitential practices were revised and it was popularly thought that the Church had lifted the requirement of Friday abstinence from meat, the housekeeper remarked: “Oh, the bishop will be so disappointed. He so enjoyed his Friday lobster dinners.” Yes, there was a need to implement a more serious, responsible and sincere observance of penitential practices at the time—and even more so now!
6. The sacrament of Penance
Second in this area of ongoing preparation: what about the sacrament of Penance? Regular confession is essential for any Catholic who wants to pursue the path to holiness. To be properly disposed to receiving Holy Communion, to have the assistance of God’s grace in the forgiveness of sins and the assistance to move away from whatever those little habits might be that hinder us from our full conformity to Christ, to whom we are consecrated in Baptism and in Confirmation—for all of this, regular confession is indispensable.
7. Prayer throughout the week
Third, of course, is prayer throughout the week, taking time every day for Christ, to pray, and letting there be time for silence. To be away from all of the digital devices and all those other nagging distractions, to be still before the Lord, in adoration of Him in the Blessed Sacrament. Praying the rosary. These are all things our Lady asks us to do, right? Whenever she appears anywhere in the world, she asks us to adore her Son in the Most Blessed Sacrament, to pray the rosary and to observe penance and especially confession.
The rosary is, essentially, a biblical prayer. The mysteries we meditate on in the life of our Lord and our Lady are right there in the Gospels, and most of the words of those prayers come straight from the Gospels as well. And there are also other laudable ways to pray with the Scriptures. There is obviously Lectio Divina, that prayerful reading of Scripture in which one chooses a particular Scriptural text and with it moves through the four steps of reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation. It helps to bring out the fulness of the text with the four senses of Scripture, helping one to understand the meaning of the text better and how it applies to the reader’s life. There is also the Ignatian method of meditation. We heard some sharing on that last night, from Sr. Bethany Madonna, SV. Very insightful comments. You could tell this was coming from a deep place of spirituality. The Ignatian method, in which you use your imagination to place yourself in the scene and make it very vivid in your mind using all the five senses, makes the Scriptures come alive in a very personal way and leads to ever new insights.
Putting it into action
The fourth category, I would say, is putting this all into action—making our active participation visible by the way we live our lives.
8. Serving the poor
First of all, there is the quintessential identifying mark of Christians that is serving the poor. There is so much good happening, even in the midst of so much darkness in the world in which we find ourselves. There are myriad possibilities to volunteer to serve the poor in any number of ways: crisis pregnancy clinics; homes for single, pregnant women, to help them get back on their feet in a life-affirming way; places of refuge for victims of domestic violence; homeless shelters and diners for the homeless and near homeless and all who are poor. There are so many ways.
Pope Benedict XVI reminds us in his Encyclical on Catholic social teaching, Deus Caritas Est, that charity is constitutive of the Christian life. It’s not an optional add-on. We can’t say that, because the government has programs to take care of these people (well, maybe not all of them!), we don’t have to. No, charity is constitutive of the Christian life. We cannot live an authentic Christian life without a life of charity and without caring for the poor.
9. Evangelize
We must remember the aim of all this, which is to evangelize. This is a matter of putting faith into action. To evangelize means to bring people to Christ who don’t know him or closer to him for those who do but not well enough, so they can live the way that he teaches us. Which means you also have to stay actively involved in your parishes. There are so many opportunities within our parishes for this. I think immediately of organizations and movements such as St. Vincent de Paul and the Legion of Mary. St. Vincent de Paul goes into people’s homes to assess their needs. They provide them material assistance, both for the Vincentians’ own spiritual growth and also, through that, for touching the needy with the love of Christ. So you see, true charity, sharing the love of Christ—that is, giving for the good of the other, giving to give and not to get—evangelizes.
And the Letion of Mary goes out literally knocking on doors. This is the real grunt work of evangelization! That is to say, there is no evangelization without in-person, one-on-one encounter. Yes, we need to use social media. We need always to learn how to use it more effectively to reach people. But it’s a means to the end. The end is the interpersonal, in-person contact. We have experienced that during the COVID pandemic, how hard it is to be apart like that. Virtual presence doesn’t work, not in the long run! Physical presence is the key to touching people with the love of Jesus Christ.
Also, in addition to parish organizations and other such organized efforts to serve the poor, there is the evangelization that needs to happen in our own spheres of influence. We need to be witnesses to the life and beauty of Christ in our places of work, in our schools and in the communities in which we are involved. You never know when, even as hostile as our culture has become toward religion, someone might be open to hearing a word of truth about the message of Jesus Christ. I think more and more people, and especially young people, are realizing something has gone wrong. The way they are told to live their lives is not working. They might be open to hearing the way that really does work, which is the way of Jesus Christ.
10. Vocation
Lastly and most importantly is to live your vocation faithfully and well. This is the purpose of a vocation, is it not? It’s the way God calls us to live, in order to be formed into a life of holiness and become the person He has created us to be. He formed His human creation perfectly into His own image—the image in which He originally created us—the image which, of course, was lost by the fall of our first parents, but not irremediably. Growth in holiness is nothing more than finding the life of true happiness. Our communion with one another leads to our communion with God, so that we might be happy with God in this life and perfectly forever with Him in the next.
So these are the ten ingredients I suggest for a recipe for Eucharistic Revival: how we behave in church, our participation at the liturgy and observing silence; already preparing for Mass before we leave the home, by being mindful of how we dress and observing the Eucharistic fast the best way that we can; the ongoing preparation which is the observance of penitential discipline throughout the year, most especially for the penitential seasons, and above all the sacrament of confession –regular confession!—and being careful to engage in prayer all throughout the week; and, finally, manifesting it by putting it all into an action through service to the poor, our efforts for evangelization, and living our vocation faithfully and well.
The more we observe the external things with the right spirit the more we will grow interiorly, more perfectly conformed to Christ. We will then manifest more clearly our love for Christ in the Eucharist.
Conclusion
This is all essentially, then, a biblical vision: all of life is a liturgy, leading us to the worship of God in Heaven. We are about to enter into that worship right now, as we continue on with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is why we sing the three-fold cherubic hymn at this point, right at the beginning of the Canon of the Mass. It recalls the vision Isaiah had when he received his call to be God’s prophet in the Temple. We have an eyewitness of the Heavenly worship! And this is what the angelic voices were singing: “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Three-fold Holy, because God is the holiest of all. “Lord God Sabaoth, Heaven and Earth are full of Your glory.”
We are about to enter into His presence as He comes down to us on the altar. Let us ask God that we may all persevere in our personal lives in what we need to do to bring about a Eucharist Revival: in ourselves, in our loved ones, and in the whole Church. God will then bless us by giving us peace. May God grant us this grace. Amen.