‘I am still moved to tears’: Religious sisters, priest, bishop, reflect on National Eucharistic Congress

CNA Staff, Jul 27, 2024 / 08:00 am

The National Eucharistic Congress, which gathered more than 50,000 Catholics together last week in Indianapolis, was “powerful,” “moving,” and filled with “extraordinary reverence,” according to religious sisters, a priest, a seminarian, and a bishop who attended the culminating event in the U.S. bishops’ three-year Eucharistic Revival.

Religious and clergy were well-represented at the congress, with more than 1,170 priests, 1,200 religious brothers and sisters, 630 deacons, 610 seminarians, and 200 bishops. CNA spoke to some of them about what moments and reflections were most life-changing and memorable.

Reverence permeated the Congress 

“The most powerful moments were the moments of adoration in Lucas Oil Stadium, when everybody was on their knees, adoring the Lord in praise and in silence, too,” recalled Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska. 

Conley remembered seeing everyone, including his brother bishops, “caught up in the mystery of the beauty of God” during adoration.  

“The common denominator that ran through all of the liturgical encounter was reverence; that we were recognizing God as Our Lord, in silence and in song,” he said. “St. Augustine is famously quoted as saying, ‘Only the lover sings,’ and the only proper response to the love of God is to sing with our hearts.”

Aidan Aguero, a 19-year-old seminarian from the Archdiocese of Seattle, recalled being moved during the silence of adoration by “seeing that everyone was having some encounter with Christ.”

“[With] all 60,000 people there adoring Our Lord in the Eucharist, people encountering Our Lord in the Eucharist, there was something moving there,” he said. “Nobody can deny that something was moving in that stadium, and as Catholics, we believe that’s the Holy Spirit. We believe that it’s Christ in the Eucharist.”

Sister Mary Aloysius of Jesus Kim, the general sister servant for the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT), also recalled the “prayerfulness” of adoration, calling it “stunning.”

“Just imagine this football stadium filled with people, and when Our Lord comes out, the lights are out, it’s dark, and there’s just light shining on the monstrance, and the place is quiet. These 50,000 people are adoring Our Lord silently,” she said. 

“That was so moving, so beautiful, so stunning, that it just moves us to tears,” she recalled. “And even now, when I look back on it, I am still moved to tears.”

The whole body of Christ 

Unlike many retreats or conventions that focus on one age group, the congress brought together Catholics of every age and vocation. 

“The whole body of Christ, from pregnant moms with children in tow to grandparents and great-grandparents in wheelchairs, and everything in between” was there, Conley observed. 

“It was the experience of the whole body of Christ coming together,” he said. “Every vocation and every dimension of the Church, the body of Christ.”

More than 100 sisters of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist attended the congress. Sister Mary Michael Carlton, their vicaress general, recalled that there was a natural friendliness of attendees toward whomever they encountered — workers, locals, homeless people.

“We had one sister singing on the street with one of the homeless people, and he ended up coming to the congress — somebody registered him for the congress, and he was later in the procession with his congress badge on,” she said. “They weren’t in the periphery. They were part of this movement, too.”

“There was a lot of ministry to the poor and homeless during those days,” Conley added. 

Christ in the City, a Catholic organization that uses a relational approach to ministry to the homeless, organized street walks for ministering to the poor and homeless, he recalled. 

“It wasn’t just an internal ad intra experience, but it was going out of ourselves and out into the streets to proclaim that Christ is risen, he’s alive, he loves you, and to present him to everyone who will listen,” he continued. 

A web of processions

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The body of Christ then took to the streets in a Eucharistic procession through Indianapolis, Conley recalled.

“I saw that [procession] as taking Christ to the streets and claiming the city for God,” Conley reflected. “Taking Jesus to the streets and proclaiming that Jesus Christ is king and that he is the king of the world. He’s the center of everything, and he’s not just in our churches — he’s out on the streets with the poor.”

“People that were in their office buildings and people who were in their shops and their restaurants, they saw this happening,” he noted.

Anyone who attended the congress will tell you about the great procession through the streets of Indianapolis of more than 60,000 people. But there was also a “spontaneous web of processions” back at the convention center, which one priest said was “deeply moving.”

The liturgical team needed to move the Blessed Sacrament throughout the convention center for different periods of adoration, but there weren’t enough back ways, and the halls were thick with crowds of people moving between breakout sessions, explained Dominican Father Patrick Briscoe, a liturgical organizer for the event. 

So, the priests took Jesus through the crowd in the monstrance. In the rush of switching sessions, the people paused and knelt quietly as Jesus passed by. 

“People in these jam-packed hallways, trying to scramble from one session to the next, dropped to their knees,” he recalled. “They shouted out, ‘Jesus is coming,’ and dropped to their knees and waited and prayed until the Blessed Sacrament had walked past them.”

“Our people’s devotion was extraordinary,” Briscoe continued. “And part of that was a new posture that they had been taught as a result of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, which had taught and modeled the reverence one should show the Blessed Sacrament, but also the spirit of the event made it a very natural thing.” 

“It was deeply moving because in another context, it could have been inconvenient or unexpected,” he added. “And so to see our people respond with patient and extraordinary reverence really touched my heart as a priest.”

A defining moment for the decades 

“It showcased the strength of our tradition, and it demonstrated to people that the Church is alive,” Briscoe said. “It allowed people to express their love for the Church. To show up for a celebration that wasn’t political, that wasn’t charged with the fraught and polarizing climate that so many other activities and events are charged with today, was supremely liberating.” 

World Youth Day 1993 in Denver with St. John Paul II was a defining moment for a generation. The call to a “new evangelization” reverberates through the decades. 

The movement was both the fruit of WYD93 and a new form of it, Sister Aloysius observed. 

“I do think it’s like a World Youth Day in Denver, and it will be one of those moments where we go back and remember, and people will find their vocations or hear God speaking to them in these talks, and then say, ‘When I was in Indianapolis in 2024, that’s when my life changed,’” Sister Mary Michael reflected.  

“I do think powerful conversions were happening at the congress itself,” she added. “And these people who attended will go back to their parishes and start their own revivals. They’ll start drawing people back to the faith in their families or in their local communities that haven’t been to Mass in a long time.”

“The Lord planted so many beautiful seeds in his garden of his Church,” Aguero reflected. “And the Lord, in our faith and hope in him, will, through the Holy Spirit, nurture and grow those seeds for the flourishing of his Church.”

The event was so effective because it was “led by liturgy,” Conley observed.

“I’m convinced that the new evangelization will never take place, never really be truly fruitful without an experience of the liturgy and the transcendence,” he said. “You can have all the apologetics in the world. You can have all of the instruction and Bible studies and all of that, but unless you have this experience of beauty — the beauty of God in a transcendent prayerful worship experience, which really takes you out of yourself into the mystery of the love of God through prayer and through the sacrament — then that’s where we truly encounter the living Lord.”

“We meet him, and we have this heart-to-heart encounter that really goes beyond reason to worship. When we were caught up into the beauty and love and mercy of God through prayer and sacrament. And that’s what we had. That’s what we experienced.”

Go forth: Taking the message home 

“I think the most important thing is, yes, it was amazing, but at the end of the day, we have to experience our own personal revival, and I think that’s what really made a difference,” Sister Aloysius said.

“For me, I can say it really did touch my heart, and it deepened my love for our Eucharistic Lord. So there definitely was a personal revival within me,” she said. “From there, the message, especially on the last day, was to go out and share what we have tasted, heard, and seen with our own eyes to others. And that is going to be the impact. We have to go through our own personal revival through repentance.” 

“The message [of the conference] was to now take this experience that you’ve had of unity, of encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist — this really intimate, powerful experience of Christ’s love and mercy in the Eucharist. Take that now, and take that back with you to your homes,” Conley said. 

“Reach out to those who have either fallen away or who no longer go to church or who are still questioning and looking for answers: This is what I hope will be the fruit, and this is what the message was,” he continued. 

“But for me, I think seeing how on fire Catholics were for the Eucharistic Lord and going out to the streets to tell people about Jesus, it really increased my zeal for souls,” Sister Mary Michael Carlton said.

“It facilitated [revival] for us there, but then what I hoped that it did, at least did in me, was that it showed that you don’t need to get 60,000 people together and all these bishops, all these sisters — you don’t need to get all these people together to have that encounter in the Eucharist,” Aguero said. 

“The Eucharist that was there is the same Eucharist that comes down every single Sunday during Mass, every single day at daily Mass,” he concluded. “It’s the same Eucharist that awaits us in our chapels for when we are going home.”