The Eucharistic Congress: Who is the U.S. Church For?

Last month, the U.S. Catholic Church witnessed its first national Eucharistic Congress since 1976. Attendees of various stripes had positive things to say about the event, which comes in a rich tradition of such unifying events. Yet it has come under just criticism about the expense spared for it particularly when the leaders of the Bishops’ Conference have cynically cut funds from social justice initiatives after the body of bishops voted not to eliminate them. Its speaker lineup and overall ethos, as well as the sponsorships by schools and organizations, also highlighted the selective engagement of the U.S. bishops and their leadership with the church in the U.S.

The highlighted speakers at the event represented what might be termed, fairly or unfairly, a broad “center right” of the U.S. Church. Rev. Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron exemplify this example both in their approach to evangelism and their shared interest in outreach to young men through activities like bodybuilding. The overall speaker list was more diverse in various respects, including figures such as Gloria Purvis, who has spoken out against racism within and without the church at the cost of her job for an EWTN-owned radio station. A few academic theologians, such as the excellent Hosffman Ospino of Boston College, were featured. The overall approach nevertheless seemed geared to avoid ruffling feathers in conservative-leaning sectors of the church. The LGBTQ community was not publicly represented (and not for lack of interest), with a group of priests attempting to bring forward a message of inclusion denied a booth at the congress. As Rev. Bruce Morrill pointed out in an essay about the Congress for Outreach, there is no inherent tension between “traditional” devotional practices and “progressive” social causes within the church.

The most notable exception to the general tendency of featured speakers was Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy, following in the footsteps of Day herself who spoke alongside Mother Teresa of Calcutta (and protested a Mass for the military in what turned out to be her final public appearance) at the 1976 Congress. It was very good that she appeared, although the invitation and association of the congress with Day’s legacy may have been a sign of precisely the taming of holiness that Day remarked upon when she famously asked not to be called a saint because she did not want to be dismissed that easily. Hennessy’s presence and talk emphasizing the connection between the Eucharist and the works of mercy brought a small touch of radicalism to what was essentially an upper-middle-class event in its cost ($360 per person to attend, $99 even to listen to podcast versions of the talks in retrospect) and aesthetic (specially-produced craft beers and other foods at the “Eucharistic café”).

The Eucharistic Congress brought an intensive focus on the liturgical-devotional practice of Eucharistic exposition and adoration. This practice, which has been on the rise since the 1990s after a period of relative de-emphasis following the implementation of Vatican II, is certainly a positive one with spiritual benefits as Morrill’s essay mentioned above points out. Yet it is as central to Eucharistic theology or devotion as its emphasis at the congress might lead one to believe. Certainly, the Mass was also heavily featured as it ought to be, but the overall atmosphere had more of a devotional and catechetical emphasis than that of a “church that goes forth” as Pope Francis has repeatedly called for. On this note, the dynamics around the Eucharistic Congress were also not helped by the naïve catechetical language about the real presence that surrounded the congress; speaking of the Eucharistic Host and “Jesus” interchangeably might be appropriate for a small child but is bad sacramental theology when presented to adults.

Why was the Eucharistic Congress so selective in who it engaged and how it engaged them? Barron’s reflection on the congress, in which he includes a critique of liberalism, gives a good sense of this. For many bishops, “real” Catholics are conservatives, particularly on social issues surrounding gender, sexuality and family, and they have shaped a church whose appeal tends in this direction. On one level they are not wrong—surveys have shown an increased correlation between religiosity and conservatism. Yet their activities have leaned into this correlation rather than complicated it. Questioning such an approach is not a matter of making the church safe for liberals but rather seeking an open church that actively works at including all who come in good faith.

The most durable contribution of the 1976 Eucharistic Congress—and a reminder of the shift in emphasis from then to now—was Omer Westendorf’s “Gift of Finest Wheat,” still a staple of the musical repertoire at numerous parishes across the country. That congress was a demonstration of the continuing (perhaps false given the rampant clerical sexual abuse and coverup in that era) vitality of the U.S. church even while post-Vatican II divisions rocked it. This year’s congress may serve as an epitaph to a period in which the bishops sought to consolidate a declining church suffering from the self-inflicted wounds of the sexual abuse scandal and alienation of many Catholics by politics inside and outside the church. They have sought to do so on their terms, with their preferred institutions, and with disregard for Pope Francis and his agenda. While the Eucharistic Congress succeeded by many lights, their overall agenda has flailed. May there be a new one soon.

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Daniel A. Rober is a systematic theologian and Catholic studies professor at Sacred Heart University.

Go, Rebuild ... with Mercy and Empathy

"... our love for our brothers and sisters is the measure of our love for God ... For the Christian, there is no ‘strange human being.’ He is in every instance the ‘neighbor’ whom we have with us and who is most in need of us. It makes no difference whether he is related or not, whether we ‘like’ him or not, whether he is ‘morally worthy’ of help or not...if the love of Christ lives in us, then we do as He did ..."

—Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross [Edith Stein]

Immigration has been one of the most impassioned topics in the United States, not only for communities along the southern border but even in the northern regions of the U.S. As a lifelong New Englander, I cannot presume to understand fully the experiences of people who live in those southern border states; however, on this platform, it does seem fair to reflect on immigration briefly from a broadly Catholic perspective and as an example of societal conflicts in the pews as much as in the pulpits. More significantly, the rhetoric expressing those conflicts reveals a soberingly cheerless dimension of contemporary American Catholicism.

For example: a recent report in the National Catholic Reporter details the indefatigable efforts of the governor of Texas, Jim Abbott, and his attorney general, Ken Paxton, to close Annunciation House, a non-profit, all-volunteer-staffed, center in El Paso, Texas. It was founded by lay Catholics to offer care and assistance to the most vulnerable (i.e., undocumented) immigrants, notably families. Paxton is not Catholic, but Abbot boasts that he is a practicing Catholic. As governor, he has worked closely with Paxton to prevent immigrants from entering (and remaining in) Texas and, more widely, the United States, employing the rhetoric and acts of racism, classism and fearmongering. Some news accounts have even referred to the efforts of Abbott and Paxton as a “crusade” against immigrants. In a recent report about their attempts to shutter Annunciation House, Paxton was quoted as saying that the Catholic teaching of the “works of mercy” (based on Matthew 25:31f.), which informed the religious foundation of Annunciation House, are little more than “bohemian ideas” and constitute ideological problems. Abbott did not disagree: mercy and empathy for the plight of others are the problems.

In response, the Texas bishops (rather remarkably!) issued a fulsome statement that critiqued the immigration narrative and policies of Abbott by basing their remarks on Scriptural evidence and the tenets of Catholic Social Justice Teaching. However, in regrettable contrast, a majority of lay Catholics in Texas, as one report documented, did agree with the efforts and ideology of Abbott and his government, just as a near-majority of U.S. Catholics (with the exception of 18-34 yrs.) reject programs of mercy or conciliation for refugees and immigrants (and other marginalized communities).

The question then must be: whence the hardness—the exclusionary mentality—so many lay Catholics seem willing to embrace, even in a Church that is itself a church of immigrants? Of course, the topic of immigration is but one example: harsh language, cruel invective and mean-spirited rejection of any “other” are becoming characteristics of Catholic thinking and Catholicism, at least as has become evident in popular media. If being “Christian” means to “take on the Christ,” then mercy and empathy, not callousness and insensitivity, must flourish in the Christian soul.

In meditation on that truth, let us remember that the feast day of Edith Stein/Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is August 9, the day in 1942 when Nazis murdered her, her sister Rosa and thousands of others, mostly Jewish, in Auschwitz death camp. Prior to her conversion and taking vows as a Carmelite, Stein was a brilliant philosopher of phenomenology who wrote passionately about the virtue of empathy and the “logic” of living mercifully in the world with others and warned against an excessive individualism that can destroy such feelings of mercy and empathy. She wrote, “If we take the self as the standard, we lock ourselves into the prison of our individuality. Others become riddles for us, or, still worse, we remodel them into our image and so falsify historical truth.” For Stein, rampant individualism—so valued today—is more like a prison, separating the self from the other, and making the other an enigma and thus, someone to be feared. The empathic soul—the necessary condition of the Christian soul, following Christ—is open to the other, is willing to learn about the other, and so to dignify the personhood of the other. The merciful do not seek to win every contest, to vanquish others (by words or deeds) in every battle, but, as Stein taught, to acknowledge the reality of the other to be as worthy as one’s own.  

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June-Ann Greeley is a medievalist and professor of Catholic studies, theology and religious studies at Sacred Heart University.

It Could Happen to a Bishop

July in Ireland is the time we have our All-Ireland football and hurling championships, a bit like a Super Bowl occasion. One of the hurling stars of the Clare team who won in a thrilling final this year, Shane O’Donnell, was interviewed in the runup to the semifinal against Kilkenny. He spoke about a dark experience of concussion earlier in his career that led him to change from being a kind of spectator of sporting politics to more active involvement: “But since then, I’ve been less willing to be like, ‘Aw, you know, it’s okay…’ Or even just to go, ‘Someone else will deal with that.’”

Substitute most bishops for O’Donnell with regard to what’s going on in today’s synodal Catholic Church, and you get a surprisingly close fit. For all the encouragement to speak out candidly (parrhesia), what most bishops, in fact, seem to have done is listened patiently and generously (hypomene) but forgotten the responsibility of also speaking out about what they themselves think and believe. How else can we account for the continuing timidity of the Church around the role of women, scathingly critiqued by Tina Beattie in this blog (a redacted version was also published in The Tablet): “And so the process goes on—delays, deferrals, further reflections, unpublished reports—while the platitudinous waffle about women’s charisms and gifts drones on year after year.”

The role of the bishops may be a key to unlocking some of this institutional constipation. Back in the day, when contraception was the big issue, it was said that the then-Bishop of Killaloe Willie Walsh (now emeritus) used to annoy his colleagues with occasional newspaper interviews where he would simply note the concerns of married people he knew about Church teaching in areas of sexuality and his inability to give clear answers to their questions from current Church teaching. While he received much acclaim from the general public, it is reported that his reception at the next Episcopal Conference meeting was a lot cooler. Esprit de corps had been damaged, the Church had been criticized in public, and fellow bishops felt they themselves were being shown up in a bad light.

And that habit of deferential silence was the default institutional common sense of the day, which, as Lonergan astutely observed many years ago, has a habit of becoming nonsense when a new situation arises that needs a different explanation. Once the pope had called for a more synodal Church, with dialogue and open speech at its core, there was bound to be new cultural demands on us all in the Church, whatever our role. Many bishops have responded generously to the first part of the demand: to listen, in particular, to the “sense of faith of the faithful.” But they have been slower to speak out honestly, as if they do not remember that they are also part of the “faithful,” called to be open, and that, in their role as bishop, they are not merely passive conduits of teaching from “on high,” with a mission to maintain unity at all costs, but active, intelligent, critical interpreters of the tradition, the current teaching of the Church and the voices of the faithful and signs of the times. They are called, in other words, to integrate their humanity as critical and searching subjects with their leadership role as bishops.

A bishop, as Vatican II made it clear, has responsibility both for his own diocese and for the Church Universal. He is a collegial actor, with and under the Pope. At a time when the Pope himself has called for a healthy decentralization, when the current synod is urging more episcopal responsibility and effective authority, it would be a real contribution if individual bishops, or groups of them, were to propose that the ordination of women to priesthood be included as part of the material for the study groups accompanying the synodal process. Ordination, on whichever side one stands, is a totemic issue that affects all else with respect to women’s role in the Church. It is past time that the Church dealt with it by submitting it to theological scrutiny, in a synodal spirit.

Some bishops and groups of bishops (the German church in particular comes to mind) are already doing this. I would encourage others to be less cautious. I am quite sure that so many of these good men harbour doubts in their own minds about the validity of current teaching. We are all aware from so many historical instances how silence can become a kind of co-complicity. The failure to tackle this issue head-on is a scandal, using that term in its original meaning of “stumbling block” or “obstacle”—an obstacle to mission, the raison d’etre of synodality. As Tina Beattie puts it in The Tablet version of her blog: “I fail to understand how the Church can be a missionary, synodal Church when more and more women are walking away and taking their families with them, tired of being treated as second-class Catholics or as irrelevant to the main business of mission and evangelisation.”

Please, dear bishops, look inside and consider the call of the Holy Spirit.

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Gerry O’Hanlon is an Irish Jesuit theologian and author.

How, Indeed?

The second session of the XVI General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, known as the Synod on Synodality, is due to gather in Rome from September 30 to October 27. It will move from considering the many issues emerging from the consultation of the global Catholic Church to ask how, concretely, the practice of synodality might become the way of being and doing—the modus vivendi et operandi—at every level of ecclesial life. While these considerations may not be the sexiest aspects of the Instrumentum Laboris entitled, “How to Be a Missional and Synodal Church” (emphasis in the original), its discussion of needed structural changes portends the most consequential reform of the Church in our time. Many journalists continue to focus on the “hot button” issues of inclusion or the restoration of a permanent diaconate for women. Yet the role of the synod is not to arrive at their definitive resolution; its primary task is to determine the ways of discerning the path forward on these and other questions.

At the outset of his pontificate, in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, following on the Synod on the New Evangelization, Pope Francis issued a call for “the reform of the Church in her missionary outreach.” To accomplish this much-needed “pastoral and missionary conversion,” he urged the bishops and all the faithful in every diocese “to undertake a resolute process of discernment, purification and reform.” He took upon himself, in collaboration with the college of bishops and the members of the Roman Curia, a conversion of “the papacy and the central structures of the universal Church.” The present Synod reflects a desire on the part of the world’s bishops to carry forward this reforming impulse in a renewed reception of the Second Vatican Council.

The Instrumentum Laboris notes the “great importance and urgency” of engagement on the part of local churches “to implement all the possibilities of giving life to authentically synodal decision-making processes” in each context, insisting, “Without tangible changes, the vision of a synodal church will not be credible.” It is at the level of parish and diocesan life that ordinary Catholics, many of whom continue to navigate life with a dormant or inchoate awareness of their baptismal dignity and responsibility, “most immediately experience the missionary and synodal life of the whole church.” In the absence of vital structures for participation and shared discernment, their many gifts and competencies, to say nothing of their wisdom and experience, are lost or not received.

Thus, the working document notes the necessity of establishing or renewing “the different types of Councils—parish, deanery, diocesan or eparchial—as essential structures for the planning, organization, execution and evaluation of pastoral activities.” It envisions the “reshaping” of these councils in a synodal style so that they might become “subjects of ecclesial discernment and synodal decision-making and places for the practice of accountability and the evaluation of those in positions of authority, without forgetting that they, in turn, will have to account for how they perform their duties.” The renewal of these structures must entail an affirmation of their “mandatory” character and ensure that their composition is truly representative of the diversity of the local church with greater attention to the inclusion of women, youth and marginalized persons. To accomplish this, the Instrumentum Laboris advises that members not be chosen “by those in authority (parish priest or bishop),” but be designated in some other way.

If these bodies are to fulfill their stated task of enabling local communities to discern together appropriate ways of life and witness, Church leaders must deepen their understanding of “consultation.” In recent times we have seen an increasing number of cases where the people of a local church have effectively appealed decisions taken by bishops who neglect required processes of consultation. The Instrumentum Laboris recalls that in matters of importance, consultation cannot be omitted or reduced to a simple formality. Genuine consultation, it observes, goes “far beyond listening, because it obliges the authority not to proceed as if it had not taken place.” Bishops are really bound by the consensus or general agreement or consensus of the community and ought not to go against it “without a convincing reason,” as canon law states. In a truly synodal Church, the exercise of authority is not arbitrary, and consultation is not inconsequential. Structures, processes and procedures for ongoing consultation must enable all the baptized in each place to arrive at a “shared decision in obedience to the Holy Spirit.” 

The Synod envisions the development of a more robust culture of participation and practice of synodality in every parish and diocese. Further, it urges the gathering of comparable assemblies at provincial, national and continental levels to provide spaces for broader dialogue and the sharing of resources in response to pastoral needs. The stakes are very high. As the working document acknowledges, failure to carry out necessary reforms “will alienate those members of the People of God who have drawn strength and hope from the synodal journey.”

The second session of the Synod on Synodality has a heavy agenda. But the reception of its work need not wait for the close of its deliberations, a subsequent exhortation from the pope, or the pending revision of canon law. Nothing precludes parish pastors and bishops, together with the People of God in each place, from beginning today to undertake the reform called for from the outset of Francis’ pontificate and now envisioned in concrete form. The credibility of the church and its witness depends on it.

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Catherine E. Clifford, is a professor at Saint Paul University, Ontario.