The first full day of the National Eucharistic Congress saw participants pouring into the Indianapolis Convention Center for morning and afternoon sessions on evangelization, a biblical walk through the Mass and answering Fundamentalist objections to the Eucharist by well-known apologist Trent Horn.
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, Texas, spoke to several thousand attendees about the early Church Fathers and their devotion to the Eucharist. He highlighted Ignatius of Antioch who was condemned to death and taken to Rome to be thrown as food to wild beasts for his faith in Christ.
“Nothing clears the mind like the prospect of being torn apart by wild beasts,” Cardinal DiNardo said.
Ignatius wrote seven letters to Christians in Asia Minor and urged them to celebrate the Eucharist more often. Not only that, this early Church Father wrote that he was God’s wheat, ground by the wild beasts to make bread and that he would do anything that he might become Christ. The Eucharist, Ignatius said, is the medicine of immortality.
“If you celebrated the Eucharist, you might well die,” Cardinal DiNardo said of this era in the Church’s history. “They took it very seriously. The early Church lived the Eucharist.”
Congress participants also had the opportunity to go to Confession to the more than 50 priests set up in one of the ballrooms as Gregorian chant music drowned out penitents’ and confessors’ voices. Religious sisters of various communities directed people who stood in long lines that wound around the ballroom.
As congress-goers poured into the streets during the lunch hour, they sought out busy restaurants and food trucks. Many strolled through the expo hall and took in the dozens of exhibitors, from tour companies to publishers and olive wood vendors. Others wandered across the street to the historic St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church for adoration.
Humble sacrifice
The evening revival session featured two superstars of the Catholic culture: Fr. Mike Schmitz and Mother Olga of the Sacred Heart. The event was even more crowded than the previous evening, and 25 minutes into the program, people were still climbing to the very top rows of the stadium to try to secure the rapidly filling open seats.
Mother Olga spoke of growing up in the war-torn Middle East, surviving trauma and abuse and eventually founding a religious community based in the Archdiocese of Boston. She shared several stories of cancer patients and others who experienced healing through the Eucharist.
Perhaps most touching was the story of Emma, a premature baby girl who weighed just one pound and whose twin brother had died. The girl had numerous medical issues, including problems with her kidneys and her eyes.
Mother Olga visited frequently and on Sundays placed a pyx with a consecrated Host in the incubator. The presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, Mother Olga said, was recognized by doctors and nurses who referred to the incubator as Emma’s Chapel.
“She just turned 1 and weighs 18 pounds,” Mother Olga said. Emma is healthy with no side effects of being premature. “Only Jesus can do that.”
And then it was Fr. Schmitz’ turn. He received a standing ovation before he even began speaking.
Fr. Schmitz’ popular Bible in a Year podcast has been downloaded 660 million times. The director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Duluth as well as the chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, his fast-paced style seemed to captivate the crowd of more than 50,000 packed into Lucas Oil Stadium.
Reading from the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Fr. Schmitz walked the crowd through how Jesus might have explained things to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Reviewing major events in salvation history, the popular podcaster had a pithy definition of sin: “God, I know what you want, but I don’t care. I want what I want.”
The sin of Adam and Eve, Fr. Schmitz said, who was also a keynote speaker at a Diocese of Phoenix event last March, “broke our relationship with God” and created an unbridgeable gap, a gap that could only be bridged by Jesus’ death on the cross.
“He redeemed us and made it possible for our sins to be forgiven. There’s only one action of Jesus that restored us—the Cross, when He offered Himself to the Father in loving obedience.
“What saves us is the humble sacrifice of Jesus to the Father.”
Every time the priest lifts up the Eucharist and says “through Him, with Him, in Him” we are looking at the Lord on Calvary, Fr. Schmitz said. “Every time that happens the Lord is glorified and the world is restored.”
A hard word
But it wasn’t all sunshine and smiles as Fr. Schmitz went on to explain that eucharistic revival isn’t just about growing in the knowledge of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
The problem, he said, is that “we know. We just don’t care.”
If the cure for ignorance is knowledge, the cure for indifference is love.
“The road to love is repentance,” Fr. Schmitz said. “You can’t have revival without repentance.”
“Knowledge can make you great. But only love can make you a saint.”
He urged the congress-goers to examine themselves and see what “fire extinguishers” in their lives were putting out the fire of their first love of the Lord.
When the huge monstrance with the Eucharist was brought into the stadium for adoration,
the crowd of tens of thousands once again sang hymns in Latin but this time, they were joined by a young men’s vocal ensemble known as Floriani.
Kneeling on concrete, thousands watched as the monstrance was placed on the altar and incense floated through the air.
As attendees took to their feet to exit, Montse Alvarado of EWTN News, told the crowd, “See you in the Eucharist.”
