It seems like every few months, someone writes an article asking: “Why are so many young people turning to Catholicism?”
There are plenty of answers to this, some sociological and some political. Young people really are starving for something older and weightier than the culture they were handed. They are tired of the constant so-called revolutions liberalism promises.
But the deeper reason is a movement of the Holy Spirit, best indicated by the Eucharistic Revival. The continued success of this revival depends on our commitment to focusing on Christ in the Eucharist.
Our nation’s religious practice has been in decline for a number of decades, and religious leaders noticed it as early as the 1970s and 1980s. We tried many things to appeal to people. We tried softening our doctrine, we tried giving aspects of the liturgy broader appeal, we tried introducing modern music and modern sermons. We effectively went on a rebranding campaign, much like New Coke in the 1980s. Much like New Coke, we changed the formula that made Catholicism so successful. The rebranding campaign largely failed.
It failed for a couple of reasons, one being that we’re never going to out-brand corporate America. We cannot market ourselves to be more palatable than what the world has to offer. The more poignant reason is that the rebranding made our religion devoid of its Spirit. The one thing we didn’t try until relatively recently was to recommit ourselves to the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
Fortunately, that recommitment to the Eucharist is working. The recent wave of conversions continues every year. It seems more inquirers start the process each autumn than the one before. This is a bellwether that our Church’s focus is moving in the right direction, namely a focus on Jesus Christ and the Eucharist.
In the parable of the sower, Jesus describes a harvest that bears fruit thirtyfold, sixtyfold or a hundredfold. A harvest that bears thirtyfold is a very good harvest. Sixtyfold would have been astounding, the kind of yield a farmer might experience once or twice in his entire life. But a hundredfold is unthinkable, so spectacular that it must be divine.
Right now, we are seeing the small fruit from these past decades of devotion. But, wherever we are, the hundredfold harvest is possible for our nation.
The apostolates, parishes, ministries and religious orders in our country that focus on the Eucharist are exploding. For the last three decades or so, we’ve had a Eucharistic revival within the Church, leading up to the National Eucharistic Congress, and now it’s time to bring that revival to the nation.
The Eucharist is, in the most literal sense, a sacrament of multiplication. It is the sacrament that reproduces itself literally (break the Host into a hundred pieces, each one is still fully Christ) but also mystically, forming the recipient into another Christ.
In John’s Gospel, Christ takes five loaves and feeds thousands, and only after that miracle does He tell the crowds that He is the Bread of Life. The juxtaposition of the multiplication and the Bread of Life Discourse points to the Eucharist as a sacrament of multiplication – a sacrament of evangelisation. Christ shows us the mathematics of the Kingdom, five loaves becoming enough for a multitude, and then He gives us a sacrament that repeats the same miracle.
Our world needs the Eucharist now more than ever. The material bounty of the world is distracting. We’re so focused on things, the res, that it’s hard for spiritual truths to break through, and knowing this about the human heart, Christ meets us in the material under the appearance of bread and wine. Catholicism in particular is the fullest form of Christianity that sanctifies the material, that sanctifies the world. It is not merely a spiritual faith but a sacramental faith.
The Eucharist is the Word sown in the soil of the human heart. The apostolates that work, the retreats that work, are the ones focused on the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist.
In 2024, the US bishops hosted a National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. We are supposed to hold another Congress in three years, in 2029. The Revival’s initiative was not a rebranding campaign or a programme, though many saw it that way. It was a national recommitment to adoration and Communion, to love of Him present in the Eucharist.
Between these two events, we must increase our devotion and commitment to preaching the Gospel that God has come to us. The Eucharist will bear fruit, but whether it bears fruit a hundredfold across this nation depends on how many of us are willing to work to make this Gospel known.
