The Eucharistic Revival isn’t, as claimed, a grass-roots initiative, and fails to take into account a penetrating blow to the hearts of the faithful in the US and around the world, a blow inflicted by the very hierarchy that now claims to seek to impart love for the Eucharistic Lord.
Attendees of course worshiped and adored Our Eucharistic Lord during the events of the Revival. Their sincerity not in question. There was even some beautiful music! (There was also terrible music.) I don’t even doubt that the organizers of the Eucharistic Congress that followed desire greater understanding of the Real Presence of the Lord, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in the Blessed Sacrament.
Let me bring up two issues: hypocrisy and a failure to repent.
Hypocrisy: A strong word. I’ll just touch on it.
Father Richard Cipolla explains it here very well. He says,
“The root cause of lukewarmness and disbelief [in the Real Presence] is how the Mass is celebrated in most parishes, especially on Sundays. It is the refusal of both bishops and priests to acknowledge this that keeps the Church in this country in the vapid bondage in which it finds itself.”
I myself gave two examples just to demonstrate simply how mundane practices thwart Eucharistic revival.
I also wrote about the stunningly pagan-adjacent liturgy presided over by one of the top prelates in the US, Cardinal McElroy. Are we to believe the bishops when they say they love Our Eucharistic Lord?
Actually, it’s hard to believe that they aren’t blaming us when they speak of revival and organize huge events to push it. If only we, the faithful, knew Who we worship, as Bishop Barron says in his lavish contribution to the effort. Hypocrites, when pushed to the wall (in this case, made to see that they failed in their one job, to preserve the faith in Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist), tend to pass the buck.
Father Brian S Lewis wearing a face mask symbolizing the Roman collar
I want to focus on the second reason I have a taste of bitterness when the subject of Eucharistic revival comes up: failure to repent of lockdown transgressions.
The Eucharistic revival the bishops say they want won’t happen until they admit what they did during the Covid lockdown.
They bowed to the state, which was engaged in the most grievous attack on its own citizens ever in our history. They bowed even though in most cases, had they refused to go along with spurious, illegal strictures, the state would have relented. They left any political or legal pushback to others — who did prevail.
St. Mary’s Basilica, Sydney, 2 August 2020
They allowed and required absurdities that harmed our sense of reality, things that everyone knew were theater and only served to heighten fear-mongering — which by the way, caused great harm to the mentally vulnerable, many of whom have still not recovered.
They cravenly used religious assent and willingness to obey as a weapon against the faithful, using that weapon solely on prudential matters of masking and in many cases, getting shots. But bishops never require obedience in matters that actually pertain to their sphere, such as reverent worship.
In many cases, they violated their duty to defend bodily integrity, a natural-law right expressed in Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii paragraph 70:
“Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason.”
Instead, some even handed over fathers of families, nurses, doctors, and military members to the fate of losing their livelihood by following their conscience in refusing shots they mistrusted and knew were tainted by aborted fetal tissue.
The bishops and clergy, with few exceptions, hid themselves away, refusing their people the Mass, including, unbelievably, on Easter Sunday, when virtually every church in the country was ordered to be closed.
Bishop Emil Wcela and Fr. Larry Duncklee, from their Facebook page, featuring streaming videos of them doing song-and-dance routines together during lockdown.
“A big part of me remains grateful that we did more than our part in obeying the severe restrictions leveled during the pandemic, and for the careful vigilance rendered by our public servants.”
He at least has a niggling thought:
“Yet, another part of me worries that future decades will not look back at us with the same admiration we now have for a St. Aloysius Gonzaga, St. Damien of Molokai, and those young ‘Martyrs of Shreveport’.
But he does not act on this worry; he’s content to praise his own “scrupulous” attention to orders from the government, even in the face of the truth we (and he) now know, even knowing those warnings were silenced at the time.
“Bravo! I am glad we were attentive, and realize that we have a moral duty to listen to prudent medical cautions and protect our people… Our civil leaders — federal, state, and local — applauded our attention to the strict protocol.”
For shame.
The Catholic Church has, for practical purposes, abandoned the ancient paradigm of the three-fold Way of the spiritual (and indeed universal) life, the Way of Purgation, Illumination, and Unity — especially in its first stage of Purgation.
No. We want Illumination, and we want it now.
We want the illumination of transcendent knowledge of Eucharistic realities and we want unity with God in that knowledge. Those desirable states cannot be attained without purgation, however, and God’s grace.
It’s just a reality of the human heart, that we will remain wary in this state, unable to trust. Until the people are offered evidence that our hierarchy has gone on that path of Purgation — frank acknowledgement, repentance, and reparation — I believe even those not quite aware of the wrong done to them won’t be able to follow their exhortations — not when they withheld the very sacraments that they now say they want us to offer devotion. Not when they humiliated us when we begged for those sacraments (including baptism, anointing, and marriage), in their abject submission to unjust authority.
The Church in her faithful members may recover a new love for the Blessed Sacrament on their own, heartened by the few prelates and clergymen who remained steadfast, but until the ones who claim leadership discharge their conscience, accompaniment is impossible.
About the Author
Leila Marie Lawler is a writer, blogger, and homemaker known for her work on family life and Catholic spirituality. She is the author of “The Little Oratory: A Beginner’s Guide to Praying in the Home,” which she co-wrote with David Clayton. Leila is also the creator of the blog “Like Mother, Like Daughter,” where she shares insights on homemaking, faith, and family traditions. Leila encountered Christianity as a high school student and entered the Catholic Church in 1979, the same year she married Philip F. Lawler, a noted Catholic journalist. They live in central Massachusetts and have seven children and many grandchildren.