The Christian Life as a Eucharistic Pilgrimage, Prelude to the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage Seton Route, May 18, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center
New Haven, Connecticut
May 18, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this conference, please click below: 

The outline for the talk was:

• Introduction
  • Thanks for coming as we prepare to begin today the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage eastern route, under the patronage of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who converted to the Catholic faith because of faith in the Eucharist and in particular seeing a Eucharistic Procession.
  • This route, leaving from the Atlantic, is one of four routes. Another leaves from the Pacific in San Francisco. A third leaves from the Canadian border in northern Minnesota. A fourth leaves from the Mexican border, in Brownsville. All will converge in Indianapolis on July 16, where the following day we will begin the tenth National Eucharistic Congress, but the first in 83 years.
  • I’m very grateful for the work and help of the Knights of Columbus, without whom this pilgrimage, like so much good that takes place in the Church, would not be possible. The four-part pilgrimage will traverse 65 different US dioceses and in every one of them the Knights’ Councils and Assemblies will be present welcoming the pilgrims, helping out with logistics and safety, serving at liturgies, and most importantly, giving the example of manly prayer before the Lord Jesus present for us in the Holy Eucharist.
  • Those of us on the Seton Route are particularly grateful for the help of Peter Sonski, Director of Education and Outreach here at the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center who received so many of our supplies here, including support van and trailer that we will bless after the talk and before the reception, who arranged the expert help of Steve Evans and Brad Auger to outfit the trailer with clips and shelves and other things, and who is our host today.
  • Because of the extraordinary support of the Knights of Columbus, it’s fitting that we are able to have the prelude before the official launch of the eastern route of the Eucharistic Pilgrimage, which will take place at the Church that enshrines Blessed Michael McGivney, here at the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center.
  • This is a place where, first, people come on pilgrimage, to get to know this great parish priest who in the midst of his duties as a parochial vicar at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, founded in its basement a group that was meant to help solve a few pastoral problems — security for the family in case of the injury or death of the breadwinner, true fraternity as an alternative to secret societies, and a means to form Catholic men more deeply in the Catholic faith — but that God has blessed to far exceed parish boundaries, becoming the largest Catholic men’s fraternal organization in the world. Fr. McGivney had a great love for Jesus in the Eucharist, which was the heart of his priestly life. And no doubt if we were having this pilgrimage in 1882 rather than in 2024, he would have been one of its most enthusiastic supporters.
  • No doubt Blessed Michael would be very happy that today this beautiful center is not just the destinationof a pilgrimage but a departure point on a pilgrimage not just to Indianapolis for a Eucharistic Congress but to the heavenly Jerusalem for the eternal nuptial Banquet to which the Eucharist on earth leads.
• Pilgrimage
  • The theme of my talk is the Christian Life as a Eucharistic Pilgrimage. I want to make the case that what we are beginning today, even though it is the largest Eucharistic pilgrimage in the history not only of the Church in the United States but of the Church universal of the Church, over 6500 miles through a country the size of a continent, is not meant to be understood as something exceptional in the Church’s life but essential.
  • This is because the nature of the Church is one of pilgrimage.
  • Jesus never told us to “stay where you are,” “don’t move,” but instead constantly was summoning his disciples to “get up, let’s go.” He was summoning them and us to “come, follow me,” to “come to me all you are weary and find life burdensome and I will refresh you.” He was likewise instructing them and us to go, to “go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” to “go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature” (Mk 14:42; 10:21; 16:15).
  • The life of faith is summarized by this dynamism, by this journey from wherever one might be to Jesus and then with Jesus as he not only leads us but sends us.
  • The whole Christian life is defined by this movement.
    • It’s to walk “just as [Jesus] walked” (1 Jn 2:6).
    • It’s to walk in the light as he is in the light (1 Jn 1:7), to walk by faith (2 Cor 5:7), or to walk in the truth (3 Jn 3).
    • He who made the lame walk (Lk 7:22) says to each of us, “Rise and walk” (Mt 9:5).
    • Jesus responds to the prayer of his people across the centuries, “Show me the path I should walk” (Ps 143:8) not just by saying “This is the way; walk in it” (Is 30:21), but rather, “I am the Way,” “Follow me” (Jn 14:6; Mk 2:14).
    • Those who do so are able to say with joy, “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps 116:9).
    • We can all say as we prepare this national journey, “Happy are those … whose hearts are set on pilgrim roads!” (Ps 84:6)
  • That’s why, picking up on the Church’s dynamic nature, the Second Vatican Council, in her Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, stressed that the whole Church is on pilgrimage. It said that on earth we are “pilgrims in a strange land” directed and guided by Jesus in our “pilgrimage toward eternal happiness” (LG 7, 21).
  • We proclaim that faith in the liturgy, when we pray for God’s “pilgrim Church on earth” (Eucharistic Prayer III) and summarize our life in this world as our “earthly pilgrimage” (Eucharistic Prayer for Various Needs).
  • God formed his people precisely through pilgrimage, through the dynamism of getting up from where they were and following God in faith.
    • We see this with Abraham, who at 75 was sent on a journey with his whole family to a place God would show him.
    • We see it with Moses and the Jewish people, leaving Egypt so that they might worship him, passing dry shod through the Red Sea, journeying to God’s holy mountain at Sinai, crossing the desert for 40 years.
    • We see it with the prophet Elijah, journeying 40 days through the desert to the mountain of God where God would speak to him in a gentle breeze.
    • We see it with Jonah and his apostolic mission.
    • We see it in Tobit with the Archangel Raphael.
    • We see it in the penitential pilgrimage of the Jewish people to and finally back from Babylon.
  • In the law given to the Jewish people through Moses, God institutionalized the pilgrimage, instructing them to journey three times a year to the temple, in the spring for Passover, in the summer for Shavuot (the feast of weeks or Pentecost), and in the fall for Sukkot (or Tabernacles or Booths).
    • All three coincided with the harvest, Passover with the barley harvest, Pentecost with the wheat harvest, and Tabernacles with the fruit harvest, and the Jews would come to thank God for his gifts.
    • But there are clearly Eucharistic prefigurations in all three of these pilgrimages:
      • Passover, which foretold what Jesus himself did through his passion, death and resurrection;
      • Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down upon the Church as he does at every Mass to change bread and wine through the ministerial priest into Jesus’ body and blood;
      • and Tabernacles, when we seek to dwell with God, which is made possible when the one who tabernacled himself among us in his human nature tabernacles himself for us under the appearances of bread and wine within the tabernacles in our sanctuaries.
    • Jesus himself, together with Mary and Joseph when he was young, and with the apostles and the disciples during his public ministry, would make these pilgrimages up and back to Jerusalem. So much of Jesus’ teaching took place along those journeys and within their destination, the Temple precincts.
    • It’s no surprise then that throughout Church history, the Church has lived out this pilgrim nature. The great commission is a reminder that we are meant always to be on the move, bringing the Gospel to every creature, crossing the road as Good Samaritans to care for those left wounded, following the good shepherd as he calls us by name and leads us out, being docile to the Holy Spirit who blows where he wills and came down on Pentecost as a strong driving wind capable of blowing the Church all over the then-known world.
    • We’ve seen this pilgrim nature throughout Church history:
      • When Christianity was illegal, Christians use to make secret pilgrimages to the holy sites, mainly in necropolises or catacombs where Christians were martyred.
      • As soon as Christian was legalized, Christians were coming in such great numbers that huge basilicas needed to be built to accommodate them. We see this in a most noteworthy way in Jerusalem where St. Helen had build huge basilicas over Calvary and the empty tomb, where Jesus was born in Bethlehem, where he grew up in Nazareth, and where he gave us the Our Father and likely ascended on the Mount of Olives. Likewise we see them in Rome where Constantine built a huge Cathedral — St. John Lateran — not to mention basilicas over where St. Peter was buried, St. Paul, St. Agnes, and St. Sebastian and other saints.
      • Huge pilgrimages eventually developed in Santiago de Compostela where the Apostle St. James’ tomb was, Roccamadour, where the tradition was St. Mary Magdalene was buried, not to mention others.
    • This pilgrim nature of the Church is not contradicted, but rather reinforced, by the whole notion of a parish. On first glance, a parish seems like a stable place where we go to stay, a spiritual home from which some might never leave over many decades. But the word parish comes from the Greek word paroikia, which means temporary dwelling, a residence in a strange land, or a “station.”
    • Para is an adverb in Greek that means next. Oikia is the word for house. Paroikia means to live next to, or beside, a house, a provisional residence, someone living temporarily, an exile. We see it used this way in Sacred Scripture, especially by St. Peter. In his letter he uses paroikos or parishioner to describe a foreign pilgrim or sojourner (1 Pet 2:11) and paroikia for pilgrimage, exile or sojourning (1 Pet 1:17).
    • As the great preacher to the papal household, Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa once said in a 2005 homily, “The life of Christians is a life of pilgrimage and exile. Christians are ‘in’ the world, but not ‘of’ the world (cf. John 17:11,16). Their true homeland is in heaven, and they await Jesus Christ the savior to come (cf. Phil 3:20). They do not have a stable dwelling, but are on the way to their future one (cf. Heb 13:14). The whole Church is no more than a great ‘parish.’”
    • So the Church understood as the family or people of God is meant always to be on the move. We see this, for example, in the tradition of the Station Churches in Rome, where for 40 days, the people of the city travel to a different ancient Church to pray. Lent is a time in which we go back to the basics spiritually, we repent and believe, and hence, from the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great, there has been this tradition in Lent, not of staying put, but of journeying. The practice of the Station Churches makes Lent an actual pilgrimage, which reinforces the spiritual pilgrimage of the season. Sometimes we can become so comfortable and stable at our own parishes that we can stop moving spiritually. This is a great danger, for as Archbishop Sheen used to say, “There are no plateaus in the spiritual life: if we’re not moving uphill, we’re sliding downhill!”
    • So that’s the first aspect of what I would like to emphasize, the dynamic nature of the Church as a people making a journey through time, walking as children of the light, following Christ the Way all the way.
  • Eucharistic Procession
    • The second thing I want to underline is that the pilgrimage the Church makes is a Eucharistic pilgrimage.
    • That’s because Jesus hasn’t left us orphans. As he was giving his valedictory address before ascending to his Father’s eternal right side, he gave us the great commission, to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to carry out everything he has commanded us, something that I’ve already noted points to the essential dynamic nature of the Church. But then Jesus said, “Know that I am with you always until the end of the world.” While we are moving, Christ, risen and ascended, will be with us, he promises.
    • And the way he accompanies us until the end of time is first and foremost in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.
    • It wasn’t enough for the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity to take on our nature and be conceived in and born of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
    • It wasn’t enough for him to be hunted down by assassins as an infant, an exile in Egypt, and a construction worker in a place from which Nathaniel wondered any good could come.
    • It wasn’t enough that he didn’t have a place to lay his head during three years of public ministry.
    • It wasn’t even enough that he was harassed, persecuted, and ultimately arrested, tried, beaten, scourged, crucified and murdered. It wasn’t enough that he rose on the third day and ascended 40 days later.
    • Jesus loved us so much that he willed to become our food. He didn’t just invite us but commanded us to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood to have life in us. The Holy Eucharist is, in some ways, the summit of salvation history.
      • This is why Jesus, in his apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque 350 years ago this 18-month period (December 27, 1673 through June 16, 1675), called the Eucharist, “The Sacrament of Love.” The Eucharist is the efficacious sign of his love.
    • And so Jesus wants to accompany us through time in his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, in his Real Presence, helping us along the way to unite everything in life to his saving work and sacrifice and making of our life a Eucharistic sacrifice with him, as we give our body, blood, sweat, tears, all we are and have, out of love for him and for others.

• • It’s in this context that we get, really, the greatest expression of the good news, of the kerygma, we can. It’s not just that Jesus took on human nature, suffered, died, rose, appeared and ascended. It’s as Pope Francis wrote in his beautiful first exhortation The Joy of the Gospel,
    • “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.” (164)
    • “We are convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. …We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize” (266).

• And we are able to say that about Jesus in the Eucharist. We can exclaim, paraphrasing and building on St. Paul, “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son and did not just hand him over for us all but gives us his Son every day, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?”

• This is what makes Eucharistic processions so important because they show the nature of the Church’s pilgrimage through time with the Eucharistic Lord Jesus.
  • In a Eucharistic procession, we take Jesus out of Church. Like the donkey on Palm Sunday, we transport him not through the walled gates of the ancient Jerusalem, but through the streets of our parishes, cities and towns.
  • In a Eucharistic procession, the same Jesus who 2,000 years ago used to make three pilgrimages a year to the Temple in Jerusalem (Ex 23:14) and who would traverse Jerusalem and Jericho, Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, passes, in sacramental form, through our neighborhoods.
  • During this pilgrimage he will traverse New Haven, New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Washington DC, New Orleans, Nashville, Sacramento, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, Louisville, Indianapolis and more.
• What the Church in the US is doing in combining both the tradition of a pilgrimage and the tradition of a Eucharistic process is something that has never been attempted in the long history of the Church: a coordinated Eucharistic pilgrimage — involving each day the celebration of Mass, one or more Eucharistic processions with local parishes and dioceses, holy hours, all night adoration, Eucharist-inspired charity and witness talks — of more than 6,500 miles throughout a country the size of a continent. None of the apostles were able to do this. None of the great saints like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Claire of Assisi or Therese Lisieux, to name just a few. We have that privilege. It’s mind-blowing. How lucky we are to be alive right now. How lucky we are to be called to participate, whether for one-day or sixty-five days.
• The bishops of the United States are to be applauded for their apostolic audacity in promoting this four-part Eucharistic Pilgrimage as part of the ongoing Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States, as do the intrepid young people, seminarians, religious, chaplains and others who will have the privilege to accompany the Eucharistic Lord over the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges, over rivers and lakes, on country roads and the grand concourses of bulging metropolises.
• The U.S. Bishops have called this “Our Emmaus Moment.” Like Jesus walked with the disciples on the Road to that two seven miles downhill from Jerusalem, the Eucharistic Jesus humbly accompanies us each day through daily life, waiting for us in prayer before the tabernacle, feeding us with the true Manna come down from heaven (Jn 6:32), and going out within us like Mary brought him to her cousin Elizabeth (Lk 1:39).
• But just as it was essential for Jesus to make Cleopas and the other disciple’s hearts burn by showing them, by means of Moses and the prophets, how the crucifixion wasn’t a contradiction of the messianic prophecies, so he wants us, through Sacred Scripture — all the Old Testament typologies, all Jesus himself did and taught — to get our hearts racing with love for the reality of Christ present among us, so that we, like them, can recognize Jesus in the Breaking of Bread and so that we like then can run seven miles uphill even in darkness to say, “We have seen the Lord!” and not just seen him, but tasted him, and become one with him.
• That brings us to the last point I want to emphasize. The apostolic dimension of the Church’s Eucharistic pilgrimage through time. We bring Jesus in the Eucharist out to the world he redeemed, to the people he loved enough to die for. Just as not all those in ancient Nazareth recognized him as anything more than a fellow Nazarene, so many today, including some Catholics, don’t see in the Eucharist anything more than bread, even if special bread.
• Through Eucharistic processions, and even more so by a huge Eucharistic pilgrimage, we are boldly and unambiguously testifying that we believe what we are carrying in the monstrance is not a piece of bread at all, but, as Jesus said, the Living Bread come down from heaven, who has given us his Body and Blood for the life of the world (Jn 6:51).
• I had the privilege to help organize the New York State Eucharistic Congress last October at the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville, New York. One of those I invited to speak was the great Peter Kreeft. He spoke with the logical precision that has always characterized his 90 plus books and counting. He used the same logic that C.S. Lewis once used about Jesus’ divinity to apply it to the teaching about Jesus in the Eucharist. C.S. Lewis taught that Jesus was either who he said he was, a lunatic who thought he was actually God, or a liar. Dr. Kreeft said about the Eucharist:
  • The Catholic claim about the Eucharist is barely believable, incredibly incredible, stunningly stunning, astonishingly astonishing. Almighty God assumes human flesh and lets us eat his body and drink his blood!
  • This is so shocking that when Jesus preached it, in John 6, most of his disciples, who up to that point had left everything to follow Him, stopped following and started leaving. And you have to sympathize with those early protesters, those early Protestants. This startling Catholic claim is either true or false. If it is false, if the Eucharist is not Christ Himself but only a holy symbol of Christ or a ceremony established by Christ, but not the very self of Christ, then Catholics are the most shamefully sacrilegious and idiotic idolaters in history, bowing down to bread and worshipping wine, confusing chemicals with the Creator of chemicals.
  • The Eucharist is either to be worshipped as God, as the extension of the Incarnation, or denounced as the most blasphemous and ridiculous idolatry in history. The one thing it cannot possibly be is something comfortable, and compromising, something non-divine and therefore non-divisive, merely a holy symbol.
• The reality is that many, indeed most, Catholics treat the Eucharist as something comfortable, as an accessory to their life at best, not as its source, summit, root and center. They treat the Eucharist as a what rather than a Who. They don’t treat this truth of faith as “incredibly incredible, stunningly stunning, astonishingly astonishing.” This Eucharistic Pilgrimage does. All the Eucharistic adoration that will take place does. The devout Masses do.
• Eucharistic devotions in general, and processions in general, meekly confront the world — Catholics and non-Catholics both — with a choice: either those in procession are out of their minds, believing a piece of unleavened bread is the Creator of the universe, the Savior of the World; or that these processing Catholics are right and anyone not in the procession with them are the genuinely crazy ones.
• Just as in Jesus’ time, many of his disciples responded to his teaching on the Eucharist by saying, “This teaching is hard; who can accept it?” (Jn 6:60) and abandoned him, so today, too, many sadly find the teaching difficult and unacceptable. Half of those who practice each Sunday and seven of ten Catholics overall say they do not believe in the doctrines of transubstantiation and the Real Presence.
• But even if it is hard, we seek to reply like St. Peter, “Lord to whom shall we go?” We believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing can be truer than the Word of truth. This is the Res Mirabilis, but it is true that a pauper et servus humilis manducat Dominum, and can abide with him on the outside and on the inside.

• Conclusion
  • Elizabeth Ann Seton was someone who grew to grasp this reality. One of the biggest reasons for her conversion was because of her faith in Jesus’ real presence in the Holy Eucharist and by seeing him pass by.
    • Before her conversion, she wrote to her Sister-in-law Rebecca, “How happy would we be if we believed what these dear Souls believe, that they possess God in the Sacrament and that he remains in their churches and is carried to them when they are sick.”
    • To Rebecca again. “The other day in a moment of excessive distress, I fell on my knees without thinking when the Blessed Sacrament passed by and cried in agony to God to bless me if he was there, that my whole Soul desired only him.”
    • Eventually she learned how to draw her whole life from him.
  • Similarly, the pilgrims on the other routes likewise teach us valuable lessons.
    • Juan Diego used to walk 15 miles each way to daily Mass;
    • Junipero Serra journeyed thousands of miles to bring the Eucharistic Jesus to missions he would establish throughout Mexico and California;
    • and Our Lady is the model of Eucharistic faith, shown in the way she received Jesus within her womb.
  • We ask their collective intercession as we begin this journey, that what begins on the commemoration of the birthday of the Church may lead to a true rebirth and indeed revival of Eucharistic faith in our country.
  • And because the Christian life is indeed a Eucharistic pilgrimage, we ask these patrons, together with Blessed Michael McGivney, to pray that that we and many others may as a result of the Church’s Eucharistic witness to join Jesus on the Eucharistic pilgrimage of earthly life all the way to its conclusion in the eternal nuptial feast where we pray we will meet them, be able to thank them, and be able to rejoice with them eternally at the place our Christian Eucharistic pilgrimage ends.

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