National Eucharistic Congress, a Catholic mega-event, to kick off evangelization year

(RNS) — Two years ago, faced with low Mass attendance, deepening political and theological divisions and the continuing fallout from the clergy sexual abuse crisis, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops set forth on a campaign that will come to fruition this week in Indianapolis, where Catholics will pack a National Football League stadium while praying in the presence of the Eucharist.

Is this any way to transform American Catholicism?

The Rev. Josh Johnson, pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Church and School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, thinks so. 

“Everything flows from the practice of just sitting and watching and looking at Jesus,” said Johnson, explaining that the Catholic practice of contemplating the consecrated Communion host comes from Jesus’ mandate to the disciples to sit with him in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. “Adoration draws us to imitation and participation in his work,” he said.

Johnson believes that a transformation based on the Eucharist can be part of a larger revival in American culture. “I have this sense that we as a nation are about to experience a profound breakthrough,” he said.

Johnson will be one of three emcees onstage from June 17 through 21 at Lucas Oil Stadium for the National Eucharistic Congress, the kickoff for the final year of a three-year Catholic evangelization campaign, which, in its first two years, focused on diocesan leaders and the people already in the pews. 

The coming third year will be the year of mission, for which Congress leaders will be encouraging Catholics to “walk with one” or to build a relationship with one person and consider inviting them to engage in the life of the church.

“Go find one person in your life that the Lord is calling you to,” said Tim Glemkowski, the CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress. “Part of accompaniment is understanding where someone’s at and walking with them and always inviting, like Jesus does,” he said.

Glemkowski said that the initiative might seem like “a small gesture of the Gospel,” but if millions of Catholics participate, the impact could be great.

For the past two months, four groups of young adults have carried the Eucharist from San Francisco; New Haven, Connecticut; Brownsville, Texas; and the headwaters of the Mississippi in Minnesota in a cross-shape toward Indianapolis, spending two months traveling to Mass and Eucharistic processions in various cities.

Montse Alvarado, president and COO of the Eternal Word Television Network and another emcee for the congress, said she tears up when talking about what she witnessed along the pilgrimage’s Juan Diego route from Brownsville, named for the Mexican saint who witnessed the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“I’ve never seen the church like this before,” she said, explaining that she was surprised that “people came out in droves in 100-plus (degree) heat.”

The gathering in Indianapolis will feature evening Eucharistic adoration sessions, Masses, confessions, speakers and panels, exhibits, a reliquary chapel, a preview of a musical about St. Bernadette de Lourdes and more.

Bishop Robert Barron, then an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, proposed a National Eucharistic Revival in 2019 after the Pew Research Center released a survey that suggested that only a third of Catholics believe in the church’s doctrine on the Eucharist, which includes the teaching that Jesus is really present, not symbolically so, in the Eucharist. (The Pew study’s wording was quickly criticized, and later studies found significantly higher belief in the real presence among Catholics.)

Subsequent planning was led by Crookston, Minnesota, Bishop Andrew Cozzens, Barron’s successor as the U.S. Bishops Conference’s committee chair of Evangelization and Catechesis. 

Glemkowski said the Pew study was less of an impetus than Pope Francis’ teaching in his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which calls for “a new chapter of evangelization” marked by “the joy of the Gospel.”

“The church is being invited on a mission to prioritize and go to the least and the lost,” Glemkowski said of Francis’ leadership.

Glemkowski said the revival’s greatest success so far has been gaining about 8,000 parish point persons to implement the revival locally. Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reports that there were 16,412 U.S. Catholic parishes in 2023.

In another nod to Francis’ emphasis on a “synodal,” or listening, church, Glemkowski said the idea for the congress as “the climactic moment” of the revival and for a pilgrimage came from synodal listening sessions, crediting Cozzens, who had chaired the synod process while in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, with bringing the “synodal strategy to the Eucharistic Revival.”

Some critics, however, have seen the revival precisely as going counter to Francis’ vision, and not only because so few of his lieutenants will be on hand. While the apostolic nuncio to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, will open the congress and a papal delegate, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, will celebrate the closing Mass, the U.S. cardinals Francis has created are either at the peripheries or not present.

In an April 2023 essay in Commonweal, Lexington, Kentucky, Bishop John Stowe lamented that “plans for a mega-event featuring plenty of (pre-Vatican II) piety and theology have replaced the focus on the Synod for a Synodal Church in the USCCB.” The 10 women religious speaking at the congress all wear habits in a time when some U.S. sisters have discarded them as a way of embracing the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

The congress’s original $28 million budget has also drawn substantial criticism, which has continued even after budget cuts brought that number down to $14 million.

“It’s a bad look to be spending $14 million that arguably we don’t need to spend on a Eucharistic Revival while we are abandoning peace and justice ministries at the national level,” said Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, referring to recent mass layoffs in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ department of Justice, Peace & Human Development.

Millies added that the initiative’s response to a decline in Catholic participation is “counterproductive,” arguing that showy rites full of gold monstrances — the ornate displays for the consecrated Eucharist — and processions does not challenge Catholicism’s “toxic brand,” which he said Catholicism has incurred in its approach to abortion politics and the sexual abuse crisis.

According to a 2023 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, the top reasons that former Catholics cite for disaffiliating are a lack of belief in Catholic teachings (70%), “negative religious teaching about gay or lesbian people” (53%) and clergy abuse scandals (45%).

“This Eucharistic Revival is preaching to the choir that hasn’t left,” said Millies, encouraging the church to search for common ground with former and prospective Catholics by focusing on Catholic social teaching and antiracism.

Though the congress is just a three-hour drive from Chicago, Millies said, “I’m not intending to go, nor I might add, do I know anyone who is.”

Some of the best-known faces of the U.S. church’s social ministry, such as Sister Norma Pimentel, the Rev. Greg Boyle and Kerry Alys Robinson, are not on the schedule, even though the congress will feature a service opportunity to “feed the hungry.” 

Glemkowski called the divisions the biggest challenge the revival has faced. “That this initiative, at times, became perceived by some as sort of on either one side of an ideological divide or another, to me, was heartbreaking,” he said.

“We’ve tried as hard as possible to prove that we’re here to unify the church,” Glemkowski said. “One of the attacks of the enemy against (the revival), right, of the devil, would be that it would be perceived as some sort of partisan project instead of really just an invitation to the whole church back to her heart.”

Yet, Johnson, the Baton Rouge priest and revival emcee who opened a chapel devoted to the Blessed Sacrament at his church, said Eucharistic adoration and social justice are not incompatible but complementary. “All the work that we do for racial justice, all the work we do for the poorest of the poor in my neighborhood, all the work we do with the teens in the inner city, it’s all a fruit of our time with the Blessed Sacrament,” said Johnson, who also serves as the national chaplain for Vagabond Missions, an inner-city youth ministry.

And EWTN’s Alvarado believes her presence demonstrates that all people are welcome in the church. A former executive director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a conservative law firm focused on religious liberty cases, called herself “a culture warrior for unity,” emphasizing that Becket worked for “religious freedom for all religions.”

Alvarado said including her, an unmarried lay person, as an emcee alongside Johnson, a priest, and Sister Miriam James Heidland shows that the congress’s organizers were open to including someone outside a “typical vocation” onstage.

“I’m going to show up there with heels and big hair, and I think represent a part of the church that longs to feel like they have a place as preachers, as teachers, as whole members of the church,” Alvarado said, connecting her role to the “revolution happening inside the Vatican,” where women can now be members of dicasteries and voting members of the synod.

“We need the church not to be political,” Alvarado said. “We need the church to be about Jesus, and there’s nothing more Jesus than the Eucharist.”

This article has been updated to correct the description of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.