Ad Jesum per Mariam

Eucharistic Revival Conference #1: What Is and Why Do We Need a Eucharistic Revival?

Eucharistic Revival Conference #1: What Is and Why Do We Need a Eucharistic Revival? So, why is there a need for the Eucharistic Revival? The Eucharist is where Worship begins and ends as a Catholic. So, why is there a need for a revival? A recent survey taken on April 12th of this year shows that people who come to weekly and / or daily Mass represents 28% of all baptized Christians. Only 20% of all Christians pray daily and consider religion very important of all baptized Christians. Less Than Half of All Christians Attend One or More Masses During the Year! Why? The survey continues to reveal interesting data. Of all Christians that come a few times a year (either once a month or so, or only on Christmas and/or Easter), this represents 45% of all baptized Christians! Less than half of all Christians go to Mass even 2 times a year. So, what are the causes of the Mass decline in attendance? The Conference entertains these ideas. Why The Decline in Mass Attendance? Despite all the reasons …. The main reason is some Christians do not believe that the Eucharist is really Jesus! Wow! This really shocked the bishops! The bishops stated they must revive what has been lost . . . the main purpose of the Mass! Jesus is Present Four Ways During Mass The Conference discusses how Jesus is present four ways during Mass. The movement and actions within the Mass are also discussed. Lastly, Conference #2’s topics are also outlined. Hear more within the first of five conferences! Listen to: Eucharistic Revival Conference #1: What Is and Why Do We Need a Eucharistic Revival? ------------------------------ Image: The Last Supper – The First Eucharist: Spanish Painter: Vicente Juan Masip: 1562 The first image is a cropped image focusing on The Bread of Life. ------------------------------ Note: Some of the questions posed to the working attendees, and sometimes their responses may not always be captured on the audio. In the future, we’ll try to do a better job in capturing the audience discussion / questions.

Broadcast on:: 13 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

So, the question is why Eucharistic Revival? You start with a survey that was taken by the Pew Research Center, is the Catholic Survey Center that was taken on the 12th April this year. And it showed that weekly mass attendance, people who come to mass weekly or more than weekly that come only weekdays or what only amount to the 28% of the people that are baptized cattle. It means that when you sit in church, if there are 10 people on the bench, then you need 7 people between you to the next person, and those 7 people are not present. From you to the next person, there are 7 people absent between you. And those who attend mass weekly, pray daily and consider a region as very important were only 20%. Only 20%. Those who come once or twice a month or a few times a year only come for Christmas when the family is meeting come at Easter and that's about it were 45%. So this is the situation and the question is why or what are the causes of the decline in mass attendance. So, here I just want to do an exercise where you are sitting in your group. Just to discuss it, maybe 4 reasons why you think people don't come to mass. Okay we come together, let's come together, let's come together. Just let us air out probably hear one of you, just say briefly what you came about, we move that way going this way. What will be the reason, what will be the causes of the decline in mass? You see, we have discussed like this together, the issues that for example, the issue of saying sexual abuse, I don't want to undermine that, but it doesn't come as one of the first things on top in your discussions. The priests are boarding home, homies are too bad. The priests are so proud those come very, very, very, very low than the things that literally shocked the bishops. What shocked the bishops in that survey was in 2019 when they took a survey said that 70% of those who go to mass do not believe in the new presence of Christ in the Eucharist. To mass? No, those who go to mass. Really? That's where we are and the, in 2019 when the bishops saw that they said we need to revive what we have lost. And when they began preparing me, how they are going to carry that out, COVID struck. And when people came back from COVID, we lost 20% more of the people that came to mass because they didn't find the need of the Eucharist. There were others that were cleaving, cleaving, coming to the rectories, asking for the Eucharist. But after COVID, it went completely down because other people, they didn't miss the Eucharist during those period of time. So, this is the reason why the bishops started the revival of the Eucharistic faith. They started in 2023 with the giving, catechism, seminars, processions with the Eucharist in different places. Probably some of you, you have experiences in your parishion, how this worked out. But the uprising in other parishes, the priests didn't do anything about this. And this year, somewhere in July, there was a national Eucharistic Congress, which actually went very well, very well, with the millions of people coming together from all over the country. So, since people do not believe that the real issue is the lack of belief in the real presence of Christ. I think I want to begin there before we go anywhere we see what we are discussing. The church teaches us that in Christ, the literature, the literature is the source and the summit of Christian life. It means that it is where we come from and is where we are supposed to go of Christian life. And the best is Christ who is present in the literature. That's the first thing that why we gather, we gather because of Christ present in our needs. And the constitution on the sacred liturgy, sacrosantum concedium, this was a first document, at Vatican II, that was approved before anything else was the first document compiled by the bishops in Vatican II and was the first to be approved. And it deals with which, because that's the source and that's the summit. I will explain more what that means, but at this point in time, that document talked of four presences of Christ, if I would say that, how Christ for ways in which Christ is present to a liturgical assembly, when people gather in the assembly. The first thing that they say which is the biggest is that Christ is present in the Eucharist. The bread and wine after consecration, they become substantially the presence of Christ, which means in his body, in his soul, in his divinity, Christ dwells in the Eucharistic species. And that is what the 70% don't be revealed. So this is the first. In it dwells Christ, who is God and man. The catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that. The second is in the minister, meaning the priest or the bishop, who is also a priest. And the document uses this strange Latin word, in persona, Christi, kaptis, at echlesia, in echlesia, no meaning. It means he acts in the person of Christ, who is the head of the church. And the priest can act in the name of Jesus Christ, but also acts in the name of the church. Because I cannot just go out there in the streets and then start blessing bread, because I was ordained in somebody's bakery, I reached there, I am a priest or this bread has become Eucharist. That cannot happen, because I should act in the intention of the church. So the power of a priest is a borrowed power. We borrow it from Christ. We borrow it from the church. Christ is present when a priest presides over the liturgical celebration. The third is in the word of God. For us, the word of God is not the characters we read in the Bible. Those are very important, but the word is a person. When we read the word, it is Christ himself who speaks to the assembly. And that is why we will see later why this is important, because what is the qualification for someone to go and read the word of God in church? What would be the qualification for someone to go and read the word of God in church? Yes. But what qualifies the priest or qualifies as the elector to read the word of God in church? Anyone who stands up, the church asks them, you take the first reading. What qualifies the person to read the word of God in church is faith. Because the Christ becomes alive to the people because of the faith of the reader who believes what is reading that this is the word of God. And in that interaction between the reader and the assembly Christ himself takes flesh in the word. And the last Christ is a present when the assembly gathers. Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in there midst. This is why the Vatican II told us that in church, when we are gathered and the Christ is present there, the liturgy we must participate in liturgy with the full active and the conscious participation. Because it is not only present, he is not only present in the blessed sacrament, he is not only present in the priest, he is not only present in the word, he is present in the assembly that he has gathered. Therefore you cannot leave one and others coming just to watch what is happening. Everyone must participate. That is full participation meaning that participating in the entire service, not just some parts. It is a very common you come to church. You have come, you are present there. But what is happening there? You are waiting just for the time to go back. It must be fully, you must be fully, you body, mind and spirit, fully present to that event. And it must be active. Therefore active begins with you praying, literally praying. This is why at the very beginning of the mass, the priest says let us pray. It is not only him who is going to read the opening prayer, each one of us must pray. This is why a priest gives time after let us pray that all of us participate with our own prayers. And he collects all our prayers in the opening prayer which is called, that is why it is called the correct. It collects all your prayers into one. Singing, is one of the things that you, music, singing is the devote's bodies, unites bodies. But you find someone comes and is just listening to the cantas and what behind there and never open the mouth or through the mass. That's active, listening, movements and being silent, silence is also active. Those are the things that make the assembly. And in saying this, you may also, you may already say, see why people say out the masses boring. That's why I don't go there. Because there is no active participation, which the litage itself requires. Conscious, this is being aware of what we are doing, why we are doing it and that is both internally and externally. Why am I signing myself? Why am I, at the gospel, I am signing myself in the head, in the mouth and on the chest? So we have to be conscious and this is very, very important. This you find in number 14 of the sacrosanctum concidium, the documented on litage of the Vatican II, number 14, they say there must be full, active and conscious participation in the litage, to meet what is required of the litage. So I want to go with another principle, very important principle that we will calculate through what we will be doing in these days. The other principle is what I had already alluded to is the rule of prayer, the rule of faith or the rule of belief, and then the rule of action. Those, at the beginning of the 4th century, there was a monk, a prospect of Aquantine, somewhere in the southwest of France, he said this, legend credendi, rex stutuati supricandi, which literally means the rule of prayer establishes the rule of faith. The rule of prayer establishes the rule of faith. This is why I was saying, show me how you pray, I will tell you what you believe. Because there are three things that happened here. The rule of praying, how you pray, it shows what you believe. If I get an example, I usually enjoy when the terror evangelists talk about our relation with God. If you are at peace with God, if you live well with God, the consequence is that you will get it, well, things will go very well with you and the, even when you saw a seed, then you will only, you reap more because you have, and even the hope reaching, even the hope, the way they stand before the prayer, it shows what they believe that. If I stand like this before God, I am going to get this because I am, if I suffer, it's a disapproval because I didn't live well. But what we believe ourselves, there is no Christ without the cross. There is no Christ without the cross. And that is what we believe. So if we believe that, if we believe that Christ is present in the liturgical celebration, we must manifest that that He is present in the celebration. Now what we believe, I mean how we pray establishes what we believe. Although it's difficult to hear, what comes first? Faith or prayer is a question of chicken and egg here. What comes first? But what establishes us in what we believe is the prayer. We raise to God. And with that, the relief and the prayer is manifested in action going out to work. This is why the mercy ends with it. Go in peace. Go glorifying God by your life. Go forth to work, to literally become other Christ to the world. So once you miss those three things, it can only be an obligation to come to Mass because everyone comes. After that, nothing works. But once you have those three things wrapped together, you have a reason to come back the next Sunday, the next morning. Though that is a pira of whom, what we do at liturgical. So far, any question, any questions, I don't want to speak and speak and speak and speak. So far so good, isn't it? So what I say, I say that I will come back to this, that the Eucharist is the source and summit. What that means is when we talk of a source is where the river begins. Let me take the example of the river. A river has its source where it begins. And when we are saying liturgy or the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, we mean it begins at prayer. It begins with the Christian life begins at baptism, and that is received in church. It is received at the moment of worship. And in this moment of worship, you become Christian. The goal is that once you go out, everything we do out there, as Christians, must bring us back to the source where we come from, must bring us back to liturgy. Must bring us back to where we are. So our journey is like this. Where we are going, where we are coming from is where we are going. Our destination is where we are coming from. This is why at the end, we hear that in the kingdom we will sing Hosanna and Alleluia. It's the liturgy where we come from is the liturgy where we go. Saint Thomas Aquinas has this creation when he talks about creation. He tells the creation comes from God, is created by God. The goal is to go back to God. So he uses the Latin words the Exodus, which means coming out of, coming from the hands of God. And ready to the whole goal of it is that it returns back to God. This is why the liturgy is the source and the summity of all Christian life. So the apostolate we do, the charity we show to others, the apostolic work we do is that it brings us back to the source, to worship of God, to the worship of God. So this is why the goal of this talks is that we develop a Eucharistic spirituality. We develop a Eucharistic spirituality. That means what we will be doing, I want us to really look at it, to start looking at it, the biggest liturgy we have. The very heart of the liturgy that we have, the mass. So what we will look at in this is the what and the why, what are we doing at the mass and why are we doing it? And how does it connect us to those presences of Christ? So our human experience oftentimes is divided into two things, into two categories. The first is that the first category, it pretends to the things we perceive with our senses, concrete things. And at the mass we have a lot of concrete things, we have a lot of tangible things. But on the other hand, there is, our senses move us, I mean, we are moved to things and see. So at the mass there is what we see and what we don't see. So this is what we are going to be looking at and the spiritual right as I say, talk about it, the compression and the action. This is the whole movement of liturgy. When you baptize, for example, when you baptize someone, the action, the tangible things you see is water, being poured on a child or on an elderly person. But the unseen thing comes with the grass that is being poured there. But the grass does, does the grass come with water? At baptism, the grass comes with the words, "I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." And not in the name of the Holy Ghost, but in the name of the Holy Spirit. The grass comes up. So there are things unseen and seen. Another way of putting it is to say, what are we doing, the what we do and the why we do it. So we are going to reflect on the actions of the mass. What we do at mass and why do we do them? Because I want to divide that from now into three parts, three elements. In these three elements will be, first of all, in liturgy time is very important, the past, the present and the future. So what we will be doing is, in the next time we are meeting, we will be to see the mass, what has been done, what we do now and where do we want to go in the future that our liturgy becomes meaningful. I think I have spoken enough for today. Any questions, any questions so far? Or just a thought that came into your mind when you were talking, yes. Yeah, I really concur with you. To believe that Jesus is present in the Eucharist is a hard thing. And we have to educate ourselves into that faith. By what we do, practically, how we reverence the Eucharist, how we really understand our relationship with God. So it is not an easy thing to believe in the Eucharistic presence in the, is a thing of faith. Because the only ones that remained, they are the ones that had faith. So that is a good point. In the very beginning of the Eucharistic celebration, you could see that there was that difficulty. The difficulty is it. How is the question of although the early church believed the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, because they said, "This is my body." The disciples knew he was not making a symbol there. He was saying literally in a literal sense, "Eat this, chew this." And among the apostles, the belief was there, Christ is present in this. But the question in this time was how does he come into that? How does this happen? Others say, "Oh, the Holy Spirit is the one, as he did, putting this flesh, his body, and so into the womb of Mary. It is the Holy Spirit that puts him there." As I say, you know, it is the words that he says, "This is my body. This is my, my, my, my, my blood." And that's what puts it. So you will see, we will see some of those difficulties in the early church to say, "When does Christ come to dwell in their species?" Thank you for raising that question. So we go back to the prayer we close here. Law, the angel's food given to the pilgrim who has driven, see the children's bread from heaven, which on dogs may not be spent. Through the emission types for feeding, Isaac bound, a victim weeding, Pasco lamp, it is blood spilling, manna to the Father's scent. Let us pray, Lord Jesus Christ, you gave us the Eucharist as the memorial of your suffering and death. May our worship of this sacrament of your body and blood help us to experience the salvation you want for us and the peace of the kingdom where you live with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever, amen. Merry seat of wisdom for us. In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Thank you for coming. (audience clapping)