Bulletin column from May 1, 2022

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:
Praised be Jesus Christ! We continue to drink in the glory of the Resurrection as we celebrate this weekend the Third Sunday of Easter. Fittingly we also celebrate this weekend and next weekend at our parishes First Holy Communion for a large group of our young people, which to us as Catholics is a privileged sacramental encounter with the Risen Christ. The Gospels and all of the other New Testament writings make it clear, on page after page, that after the Lord rises and ascends into heaven, it is through the Church, especially in the Eucharist, that He lives in the world. His body becomes now the mystical body of the community, fed with the food that is His very self. How beautiful that we are able to celebrate First Communions in this season of the Church that is so intentionally dedicated to emphasizing the mystery of Christ’s living, sacramental presence in our midst.
As we make our way into the Easter season this year, the Church in America is preparing to launch upon a broader catechetical initiative approved by the United States Bishops that is intended to shore up what polling data says is a flagging, waning faith in the Eucharist. The Bishops recently approved a pastoral document on the topic with the hope that our pastors and parishes can emphasize anew to our people the beautiful Catholic doctrine that the Eucharist is truly the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in our midst. It is not merely a ritual, or a symbol, or a custom, or some occasional fringe element of our lives as disciples. On the contrary, the Eucharist is at the center of our faith, our community, our moral life, and our identity.
Buckets of ink have been spilled on the topic of why many Catholics do not know, or cannot articulate this key truth of our faith these days in comparison to what (anecdotally) was a much higher level of belief in prior eras. Personally, I think that part of the difficulty is that the Church struggles to find a way to explain the ancient mystery in language that a modern person can relate to in a world that no longer has room for miracles and mysteries. Or to put it another way, all of the modern mistaken mindsets that lead a person to think that God is not really necessary anymore are the same impediments to fostering an authentic faith in the Eucharist. What is needed is an apologetics program on the question of God himself before we can even get into the necessity of meeting him in the Eucharist. And, such a program would have to somehow be delivered to all the Catholics who are not going to Mass which makes them very difficult to reach.
My sense of the recent, awful polling numbers on Catholic faith in the Eucharist, while I do agree with the need for better catechesis, is that the numbers are skewed. As is always the case when polling “Catholics,” one has to filter all persons under the label “Catholic” as opposed to what pollsters often term “Church-going Catholics.” Among those who are regularly at Mass, as I’ve encountered them, even if they cannot always offer a technically precise, doctrinal articulation of the Real Presence, they do know that the Eucharist is truly something divine, is beyond us, is not produced by us, and is critical to their lives of faith. If a person can regularly come to Mass because he or she believes in the living presence of an unseen God, it is an easy mental leap from that to believe that the encounter with the Eucharist is an encounter with this same, mysterious God. Most Church-going Catholics do get this point.
I also think that part of the eventual remedy of our current catechetical dilemma is that as time passes the average person is going to realize how unsatisfying it is to live in a world devoid of mystery and grace. Frankly, it is profoundly unexciting and flat to live solely in accord with data, lab results, and empirically verifiable findings. These things bring benefits to be sure, but they do not feed the soul. The Medieval world was less taken than we are with unlocking every scientific foundational principle to the material world that we encounter, and perhaps this meant a shorter life expectancy for them. However, they were far better than we are at believing in an invisible world of mystery, miracles, and divine power that undergirds all of reality. For them God’s fingerprints were everywhere and the world was alive with his power.
For a time we moderns have mistakenly believed that we are so much smarter than they were for believing in atoms rather than miracles. A truly wise person and culture needs to believe in both, and we will get there as we realize more and more that our knowledge of atoms has not brought an end to human want. Only miracles can do that. The Eucharist is a miracle, and it is one that we will believe in when we give ourselves permission to do so.