INDIANAPOLIS (RNS) — As they sent more than 50,000 Catholics who attended the National Eucharistic Congress on their way, the bishops who organized the five-day event that ended Sunday (July 21) may have sensed they were preaching to the proverbial choir. But that didn’t mean they wanted the faithful to be comfortable.
“This great revival will have been a failure if we don’t change our society,” Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, Bishop Robert Barron told the crowd that packed Lucas Oil stadium Saturday night.
The event was the culmination of a vision Barron had in 2019, when he chaired the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, after a 2019 Pew Research Center study suggested that only a third of Catholics believed the church teaching that Jesus is actually present, not just symbolically, in the bread and wine offered at Mass.
While later studies cast doubt on Pew’s findings, the bishops pressed on to create a three-year evangelization campaign, which began in 2022, also seeking to address low Mass attendance and Catholic disaffiliation.
Catholic bishops sing ‘How Great Is Our God’ during the National Eucharistic Congress, Saturday, July 20, 2024, at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)
At the congress, the 10th such event in U.S. Catholic history and the first since the 1940s, pilgrims attended talks, confession, Masses, a service opportunity and nightly Eucharistic adoration, which filled the stadium with praise and worship music and Latin hymns in the presence of the consecrated host.
Mayra Brown. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)
Meant to invigorate the faithful before sending them out to evangelize, the event seemed to have achieved that goal. Aida Tacan, from Carol Stream, Illinois, said she wanted to return to the devoted faith of her childhood in the Philippines and hoped to read her Bible more and regularly go to confession.
Mechelle Heath of Leechburg, Pennsylvania, told RNS the “camaraderie” would be her main takeaway. “It’s a beautiful experience of our love for Jesus, our love for our church, our love and patience with each other,” she said.
“We’re in a post-Christian world, and we got to step it up,” said Mayra Brown, director for community relations at a Catholic trade school in Orange County, California. “We got to be bold,” Brown said, calling on laity to be brave and support their bishops.
Alan Platt, who converted to Catholicism five years ago from a Protestant tradition, said Catholics needed to be willing to be martyrs, as speaker Gloria Purvis had challenged the audience in her keynote. “Culture is not going to go aside. They’re going to react. Usually it reacts violently to people who oppose it,” said Platt, a retiree whose parish had made it financially possible for him to attend.
Tim Glemkowski, the congress’s CEO, told RNS before the congress that he hoped attendees would represent the diversity of the church, but those who came to the congress appeared to be disproportionately conservative. Many attendees aired anti-abortion views — a position aligned with church teaching and supported by most who attend Mass weekly or more but held by only 40% of American Catholics at large.
The National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, Indiana, Thursday, July 18, 2024. (Photo by Grant Whitty, in partnership with the National Eucharistic Congress)
The same view dominated on the congress’s stages. Of the 10 religious sisters who spoke, four were Sisters of Life, a community focused on anti-abortion ministry. On Thursday evening, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose also gave a short keynote from the main stage, calling the “killing of our brothers and sisters in the womb and the rejection of the gift of human life” the “greatest human rights crisis of our day.”
Abortion was one of few political issues mentioned from the main stage during the congress. Despite anti-immigrant rhetoric’s centrality to the 2024 presidential campaign and recent Republican attacks on Catholic Charities work with migrants, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle’s listing of migrants among vulnerable groups who might hesitate to come “be present with the Lord” was one of few nods to the issue from the main stage.
Tagle, the papal envoy who led the celebration of the congress’s final Mass, asked attendees in his homily, “Why do some baptized turn away from the gift of Jesus in the Eucharist?”
Some of his follow-up questions included, “Does our Eucharistic celebration manifest Jesus’ presence, or does it obscure the presence of Jesus?”, “Do Mass-goers manifest the presence of Christ through their witness of life, charity, and mission?” and “Do our parish communities provide an experience of Jesus’ closeness and caring?”
While many speakers frequently cited Pope Francis, the environment, another of the pontiff’s key concerns, went almost entirely without mention in the event’s programming.
Before the congress, organizers like Glemkowski said that, despite holding the congress during an election year, they wanted the event to be nonpartisan and focused on unity.
Confessions are held during the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo by Josh Applegate, in partnership with the National Eucharistic Congress)
On Saturday night, Purvis, a podcast host, admonished Catholics not to put “political party allegiance ahead of allegiance to Christ,” calling on them to “rebuke” any party when it goes against Catholic beliefs.
Such partisanship was one of three “signs of disunity” in the church that Purvis spoke against. “It is disunity when we reject the pope,” she told the congress. “He needs our prayers. We must know that all of hell is unleashed against him, because he is our chief shepherd,” she said.
Next, Purvis spoke against “the sin of racism.” She told attendees, “Stop the deception. Reject the devil’s lies and temptation,” and called on Catholics to “make repair” for racism and criticized those who rejected responsibility for racial injustice.
Christ, Purvis said, “got on the cross and died for you. How are you going to say you won’t make any repair or do any atonement for the brokenness in this world? How can we reject being Christ-like?”
Lastly, Purvis delivered a pointed message to the critics of the congress.
“If you love the Lord, you should be here. Even if you don’t like how we’re doing it, you should prefer God’s company,” she said. “There’s plenty enough room for all of us to love the Lord in our special way as long as we’re faithful.”
Several theologians and a bishop spoke out against the revival before it began, criticizing its cost, theological emphasis and devotional style, as well as questioning its efficacy in evangelizing Catholics who have become disconnected from the church.
While some announced their intention to stay away from the congress, the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, which supports ordaining women as deacons, said that the congress had excluded them, telling the outlet, Crux, that the decision was ideological. (Organizers said the problem was logistical.)
Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Catholic peace activist and candidate for sainthood Dorothy Day, told the National Catholic Reporter that her requests to speak at the congress were denied twice before she was allowed to give a short speech Friday morning that largely consisted of quotations from Day.
But as energy peaked Saturday night, Barron took the stage for a keynote that seemed to subvert many public critiques of the congress, largely framing his reflections around Day’s criticism of a two-tiered spirituality in the church, in which the laity are expected to follow a simpler set of obligations than ordained clergy and religious.
“Dorothy Day has long been a hero of mine,” he told the stadium. “The laity, too, are called to poverty, chastity and obedience.”
Musicians perform during the National Eucharistic Congress, Friday, July 19, 2024, at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)
Explaining that those obligations take different forms for laity, Barron urged Catholics to practice poverty by detaching themselves from “wealth, pleasure, honor and power” and following Pope Leo XIII’s teaching in his 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” which Barron paraphrased as, “when the demands of necessity and propriety in your life have been met, everything else you own belongs to the poor.”
In calling on Catholics to practice chastity by “living your sexuality in a morally and spiritually upright way,” Barron pushed back against what he called the church’s “bad rap” on matters of sexuality. He said the church’s teaching emphasizes sexuality that is “not primarily for your good, but for the good of the other.”
Barron listed “sexual abuse” among many practices that do not fall under the “aegis of love,” one of very few mentions from the main stage of an issue that 45% of unaffiliated Americans who had been raised Catholic cited in a 2023 Public Religion Research Institute poll as a reason they had left the church.
On obedience, Barron said, “Don’t seek after what the world tells you.” Instead, he said, “do what God wants you to do.”
The bishop criticized the “self-invention culture,” where people say, “even my gender, I’ll decide.”
“What if 70 million Catholics, starting tonight, began to live their faith radically and dramatically?” Barron asked the crowd, using a figure that would include many Catholics who rarely or never attend Mass.
As the final Mass was wrapping up on Sunday, Crookston, Minnesota, Bishop Andrew Cozzens, Barron’s successor in leading the revival, took the stage to reveal that organizers are discerning whether to hold another eucharistic congress in 2033, the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but that they are also considering holding another congress sooner.
Cozzens also shared that a eucharistic pilgrimage, similar to the long marches that preceded the congress, is planned for next spring from Indianapolis to Los Angeles. He also challenged Catholics to accompany one person on a journey closer to the church.
Cozzens told the stadium, “We believe that God desires to renew his church and that this renewal will happen through you and that in renewing his church, he will renew the world.”
