Daringly Living the Eucharistic Revival to the Full, Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus, June 11, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Catholic Information Center, Washington, DC
Mass for the Attendees of the Leonine Forum Summit
Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Year A
June 11, 2023
Deut 8:2-3.14-16, Ps 147, 1 Cor 10:16-17, Jn 6:51-58

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today as we conclude the inaugural Leonine Forum Summit, we are blessed to do so with the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus. The Eucharistic Jesus, and the Mass that brings the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity to our altars, is meant to be the source and summit, root and center of the Christian life, and therefore the celebration of the Mass is meant to be the summit of this Summit and the starting point for all that the Leonine Forum is and does. Jesus’ self-giving Eucharistic love is the source and driving force of the Christian love of neighbor, of the social Gospel, that has developed in Catholic Social Teaching that Leonine Fellows learn and the charitable service they’re inspired to pay forward. Friendship with and communion in the Eucharistic Lord are the wellsprings of friendship and community that the Forum nourishes. The worship we give to the Lord Jesus at our monthly Masses and Days of Recollection is the origin of the worship we give him in Eucharistic adoration and all forms of prayer and the font of the reverence that we give to the least of our brethren in whom we see the dignity of Jesus’ image and likeness. And so it’s fitting that we finish this Summit as we began, here at Mass, faithfully listening to the Word of God, stoking our hunger for the Word made flesh, celebrating with praise, thanksgiving, adoration, and petitions the wondrous gift of our Risen Lord, and being strengthened by him on the inside to take Him as salt, light and leaven to the world he redeemed.
• The Eucharistic Jesus is the fulfillment of the heavenly manna with which, as Moses reminded the Israelites in today’s first reading, God fed them in the desert for 40 years, as a reminder that the human person does not live on bread alone. It’s the fulfillment of the finest wheat about which David sung in today’s Psalm. It is the participation in the very Body and Blood of Christ about which St. Paul marveled in today’s epistle. It is Jesus’ very flesh given for the life of the world, the true food and true drink that makes it possible to live because of Jesus not just here in this world but eternally. That’s why the Church, with the inspired words of St. Thomas Aquinas written for the first Corpus Christi celebration 759 years ago, tells us, “Praise, O Zion, your salvation, praise with hymns of exaltation, Christ, your king and shepherd true.” That’s why he urges us, “Full and clear ring out your chanting, joy nor sweetest grace be wanting, from your heart let praises burst.” And that’s why he tells us, in Latin, quantum potes, tantum aude, “Dare to do all you can” in bringing him all the love and praise we know, because, he indicates, everything we muster will come up short of the praise Christ in this Sacrament of Love deserves.
• If every year on the celebration of Corpus Christi, the Angelic Doctor and the Church as a whole dares us to pull out all the stops, this year that summons is given to us in bolded letters, because it is taking place at the beginning of the second year of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States. The first year was dedicated to priming Church leaders — clergy, catechists, Catholic school teachers, diocesan staffs, and parish leaders through men’s, women’s and youth conferences — for this second year, which is dedicated to the parish phase of the Revival, which they call the “most pivotal year” and “most impactful phase of this multi-year response to the Holy Spirit.” The bishops are asking for each of the 17,000 parishes in the United States to dare to do all they can to strengthen Eucharistic knowledge, faith, amazement, love and life among their parishioners. Since to whom more has been given, as Jesus says, more is to be expected, Leonine Forum fellows have a real opportunity to help catalyze something truly great, lasting and needed in their parishes, and today, at the end of the Summit, it’s a chance for us to make a commitment to dare to do what and all we can.
• The need for a Eucharistic Revival is rather obvious. Surveys show that on any given Sunday, including Corpus Christi, five of six Catholics do not come to be with the Lord on the Lord’s Day. That’s a clear sign that they do not know what they’re missing or, frankly, Whom they’re standing up. The lack of awareness of the fact that the King of Kings comes to meet us each Sunday has been seen in several other surveys that show that only three of ten Catholics can, in a multiple choice question, identify the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist, that after the words of consecration, there’s a double miracle: first, the substance of the bread and wide is totally changed into Jesus’ Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, and, second, the outward appearances of the bread and wine remain even though there’s no bread and wine left. Seven out of ten Catholics select, rather, that the Eucharist is just a symbol of Jesus — a symbol like a crucifix, or a statue, or an icon, but not Jesus. Well, if the Eucharist is not truly Jesus, no wonder why they don’t recognize how big a deal it is to prioritize other things over God himself present among us. The Eucharistic Revival is meant to begin to remedy head-on this widespread catechetical failure to pass on effectively Church teaching. Like Jesus’ interlocuters in today’s Gospel who responded to his teaching about the Eucharist by saying, “This teaching is hard; who can endure it?,” who questioned, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” and most of whom abandoned him, so many of our Catholic brothers and sisters, just as our Protestant spiritual siblings for the last five centuries, have been doing the same thing. Out of love for Jesus and for them, we’re called to dare to do all we can to remedy the problem.
• The US Bishops have asked us to focus on four things during the parish phase of the Revival that starts today.
• The first is to focus on reinvigorating worship at Mass, making sure that Mass is celebrated faithfully according to what the Church asks, that it’s marked by great reverence, that there’s space for prayerful silence, that it’s prepared for well with confession and spiritual and catechetical training for those who participate in the liturgy to help them to understand better what is happening so that they may draw greater fruit from it. It particularly encourages the faithful to share their witness stories about powerful experiences of Mass and the Eucharistic Jesus in their lives. I would encourage each of us to get our Eucharistic testimonies ready, and not to wait for the microphone at Church, but to start sharing with family, friends, fellow parishioners, coworkers and even your brothers and sisters in the Leonine Forum.
• The second phase is entitled Personal Encounter and it’s an appeal for every parish to host monthly “Eucharistic nights” of adoration, whether on weeknights or weekends, to give parishioners a chance truly to meet Jesus in the Eucharist together with their family and spiritual brothers and sisters. The bishops likewise encourage parish retreats and days of recollection dedicated to the Eucharist, Eucharistic processions not just on Corpus Christi, and conversations about providing opportunities for greater regular adoration of the Lord Jesus. There will be a need for people to parishioners to help lead this pillar and I’d urge Leonine Forum fellows to dare to step forward.
• The third thing that the U.S. Bishops are asking is to provide robust faith formation opportunities, including preaching series from parish priests focused on how the Mass is a participation in Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, on the Real Presence, the connection between the Eucharist and the call to holiness, as well as how the Eucharist spurs our charity. The bishops have prepared a small group program entitled, “Jesus and the Eucharist,” to help parishioners learn our faith better so as to live it and transmit it. There will obviously be a need for small group leaders. After the ten small group sessions of the first-year cycle, Leonine Forum fellows are well-equipped to step forward.
• The last of the four pillars for the parish phase of the Revival is entitled Missionary Sending and is designed to form and encourage people to go out to invite at least one person they know back to Mass and to give special care to those who are last, least and lost. The bishops ask us to imagine what Sundays would be like if each of us was successful in helping the Good Shepherd to bring back at least one of his lost sheep. What would the pews look like? What would the various activities in the parish look like? What would eventually the corps of altar servers, kids in religious education and more look like? Through this “Invite One Back” initiative, it is also asking parishes to prepare to welcome with warm love those who return, to integrate them into the familial spirit of the parish, and to help them who return to keep coming back and growing in the Christian life. The bishops in this phase not only want us to think about those nearest and dearest to us, but also about those on the existential peripheries, those who are forgotten by most, to go out to care for them and to invite them, too, to come with us to receive from Jesus, the Divine Physician, the love and healing we all need.
• In this parish phase, the bishops are asking every parish at least to take “one step” forward in reinvigorating worship, providing opportunities for people to encounter the Eucharistic Lord, learn their Eucharist faith better and invite back to the Good Shepherd one of his lost sheep. But if parishes take this appeal seriously, however, those steps could be enormous strides and create the momentum that the Revival as a whole is seeking to catalyze.
• To inspire us during this Revival and to pray for its success, the US Bishops have given us three co-patrons. The first is Our Lady of Guadalupe, whom I’m sure you all know.
• The second is Blessed Carlo Acutis, the first millennial ever raised to the altars, who if he hadn’t died of acute promyelocytic leukemia at 15 in 2006, would now be 32 years old, the age of many of you. He is famous above all for his zeal in trying to bring first his classmates in Milan and then the whole world to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, designing a website at just 11 years old to spread knowledge of Eucharistic miracles, which he had found were particularly helpful in leading his friends to take seriously the great Eucharistic miracle to which all of those extraordinary Eucharistic miracles, like the Eucharistic miracle of Orvieto and Bolsena that led to the institution of the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, point. He believed and communicated to others that “the biggest gift God gave to men was to send his only Son, Jesus Christ” and said that “the Eucharist is my highway to heaven,” the fastest, straightest route. He added with precocious simplicity, “I think that many people do not fully understand the value of the Mass, because if they recognized the enormous blessing we have in a Lord who gives himself as our food and drink in the Sacred Host, they would go to Mass every day to participate in the fruits of the sacrifice and let go of so many superfluous things.”
• But I’d like to focus a little on the third of the co-patrons, who is the least known in the United States. It’s Saint Manuel Gonzalez Garcia who was Bishop of Malaga and then Palencia in Spain and the founder of several spiritual families to try to revive Eucharistic faith in Spain during the first half of the twentieth century. His life changed as a newly ordained priest when the Archbishop of Seville, Blessed Marcelo Spínola, asked him to go preach a ten-day parish mission in one of the parishes of his Archdiocese. There was a very old priest at the parish in Palomares del Rio and the Archbishop wanted the parish to have a chance, even if briefly, to be inspired by new blood. When he arrived at Palomares del Rio, Father Manuel found the Church filthy and Jesus in the tabernacle abandoned. It changed his life. He later wrote about the experience, “My faith was looking at Jesus through the door of that tabernacle, so silent, so patient, so good, gazing right back at me…His gaze was telling me much and asking me for more. It was a gaze in which all the sadness of the Gospels was reflected; the sadness of ‘no room in the Inn”; the sadness of those words, “Do you also want to leave me?”; the sadness of poor Lazarus begging for crumbs from the rich man’s table; the sadness of the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, of the soldier’s slap, of the spittle of the Praetorium, and the abandonment of all.”
• He continued, “On that afternoon, in that moment in which I was before the tabernacle, I saw that my priesthood would consist of a work of which I had never before dreamed. All my illusions about the kind of priest I would be vanished. I found myself to be a priest in a town that didn’t love Jesus, and I would have to love him in the name of everybody in that town. I would dedicate my priesthood to taking care of Jesus in the needs of his life in the tabernacle: to feed him with my love, to keep him warm with my presence, to entertain him with my conversations, to defend him against abandonment and ingratitude, to give relief to his Heart with my holy sacrifices, to serve him with my feet by taking him wherever he is desired, and with my hands by giving alms in his name, even to those who do not love him, and with my mouth by speaking of him and consoling others in his name, and by crying out to those who do not want to hear him, until finally they would listen and begin to follow him. This would be a beautiful priesthood!”
• From that point forward, he advanced the cause of the Eucharist in homilies, books, initiatives, new foundations. He would become known as the “Bishop of the Tabernacle” or “Bishop of the Abandoned Tabernacle” for spreading devotion to the Eucharist and encouraging frequent communion. When he was dying, he put in his will, “I ask to be buried next to a tabernacle, so that my bones, after death, as my tongue and my pen in life, are saying to those who pass: there is Jesus! There it is! Do not leave him abandoned!” That’s what has happened in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in Palencia, where since his beatification in 2001 and canonization in 2016, he is buried right underneath the tabernacle. I had the honor to preach for a week in my own Diocese of Fall River and travel with the relics of Blessed Carlo and St. Manuel Gonzalez Garcia. I was able to hold him as he was venerated by thousands. It was a relic ex ossibus, or of his bones. It was as if St. Manuel were traveling in my Diocese, in the Church in the US, pointing to the closest tabernacle and saying, “There he is! There’s Jesus! Don’t leave him alone!” His relics, together with Blessed Carlo’s, will be at St. Patrick’s in New York City in just over a week. Their home base is the USCCB’s office up by Catholic University here in DC. I’d urge you to recognize that he is here in our country pointing to Jesus and encouraging us, out of love, to make up for those who neglect him by regularly coming to spend time with him and, like him, to dare to do all that we can to spread love of the Eucharistic Jesus. If St. Manuel’s life became indeed a “beautiful priesthood,” our Christian life will similarly be full of grace if we seek to live it in explicit reference full-time to the extraordinary self-gift of Jesus for us on this altar.
• For the first Corpus Christi, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote five famous hymns that are still used by Catholics across the world to praise our Eucharistic Lord. One was the Sequence we sang before the Gospel, Another, which he composed for the Office of Readings, he wrote Sacris Solemnis, famous mostly for its last two verses, the Panis Angelicus. In it, St. Thomas expresses the incredible wonder we’re supposed to have today and every day for the gift of Jesus in the Eucharist. We sing, “O Res Mirabilis!” “O, What a mind-blowing reality!” “Pauper et servus humilis manducat Dominum,” “A poor and humble servant — you and I — eats the Lord.” As we prepare for that most extraordinary happening in human life, we ask the Lord to make our Eucharistic faith come fully alive, so that we may be his instruments to revive the Eucharistic faith of the Church in our beloved country.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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