Dear Friends of the Missions, It is a great joy to greet you for the first time as the new National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States.
I was appointed by the Vatican on July 23, two days after I had completed leading the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. For 65 days, together with some intrepid young adult perpetual pilgrims, I was privileged to carry Jesus from New Haven, Connecticut, to Indianapolis, Indiana, in advance of the first National Eucharistic Congress in 83 years.
Never in the history of the Church, including in the most fervent places in Europe during the height of Catholic piety, had there been a Eucharistic procession across even their relatively small national expanses. But what had never previously been dreamed, the Church in the United States actually accomplished across a land the size of a continent.
With similar groups of priests and faithful leaving from San Francisco, Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and Brownsville, Texas, we together made a national Eucharistic benediction over the entire country from north, south, east and west, asking God to bless our Church and bless America.
Along the way, we saw hundreds of thousands come out to greet Jesus as we journeyed with him through major metropolises and small towns, brought him into famous cathedrals and basilicas as well as into rural Churches, nursing homes, Catholic schools and prisons.
It was awe-inspiring to see such faith.
It was also an important way God was preparing me for my new duties as National Director.
A Eucharistic procession is fundamentally missionary. We take Jesus out of our Churches into the world he redeemed. We seek to bring him to those who otherwise might not encounter their Savior.
On various occasions along our way, those seeing us processing with the Lord, accustomed to parades or to political protests, would shout out, “What’s this about?” The young people and religious sisters at the front would reply, “We’re bringing Jesus across the country!” Some would honk or clap in support. Others would join us.
The Church, as we say in Eucharistic Prayer III, is a “pilgrim Church on earth.” We are all on a journey, not to Indianapolis but to the heavenly Jerusalem. On that pilgrimage, we do not walk alone. Jesus himself accompanies us in his Real Presence in the most Holy Eucharist. God-with-us, Emmanuel, is still with us, calling us to follow him.
In the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus fulfills the promise he made to us when he sent out the whole Church on mission to proclaim the Gospel to all nations and to every creature. “Know,” he said then, “that I am with you always until the end of the age.” What an incredible consolation is to behold Jesus’ fidelity to those words in the sacrament of the altar!
This connection between the Eucharist and the missionary dimension of Christian life was eloquently driven home by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, my new boss, who was also Pope Francis’ legate to the Eucharistic Congress. In his homily for the closing Mass, the Filipino prelate said that “Jesus’ mission and his gift-of-self meet in the Eucharist,” as he gives us his body and blood for the life of the world. In him Eucharist and evangelization are united. They’re meant to be united in us, too.
The Church’s mission, therefore, is essentially Eucharistic. “A Eucharistic people is a missionary and evangelizing people,” Cardinal Tagle preached.
We seek to bring to the ends of the earth not just the “words of God” but the Word-made-flesh.
The Church is sent not just to evangelize individuals but to form and build Churches — communities of faith, with, as Vatican II teaches, the Eucharistic Jesus as their source, summit, root and center.
After the Eucharistic Congress, the Church in the U.S. has now entered into the “missionary phase” of the Eucharistic Revival. We’re all urged to “Walk with One” person at a time, trying to bring each person to the Eucharistic Jesus for the first time or the first time in a while. It is one way we are summoned to live out our missionary identity as Jesus’ disciples.
Another way is through your prayers and financial support for the work of the missions. You are generously making it possible for far more than “one” to come to know Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, to love him, adore him and build their lives on him.
In this way, you are strengthening the “pilgrim Church on earth,” as we, across more than 1,050 dioceses across the globe, are striving to help each other to journey with Jesus on the pilgrimage of earthly life, not to Indianapolis, but all the way to the heavenly Jerusalem.
