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After walking and driving hundreds of miles across the United States, the four routes of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage are about to converge on the city of Indianapolis in time for the National Eucharistic Congress. Taking time out during the final week of the pilgrimage, five of the Perpetual Pilgrims met with reporters in a Zoom conference on Wednesday, reflecting on highlights of their two-month journey and expressing the hope that they will continue deepening their relationship with Christ in the Eucharist.
The Perpetual Pilgrims will arrive in downtown Indianapolis next Tuesday, July 16, and process from various city churches to St. John the Evangelist Church, where they will be in quiet prayer and reflection. Archbishop Charles C. Thompson of Indianapolis will then celebrate the final Mass of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage at St. John the Evangelist at noon.
That evening, the Perpetual Pilgrims will attend a dinner organized by Fr. Roger Landry, who has accompanied the entire Seton Route from its starting point in the Northeast, and share stories with one another from their respective routes.
The next day, July 17, the Perpetual Pilgrims will process into Lucas Oil Stadium behind Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, Chairman of the National Eucharistic Revival, who will be carrying a monstrance blessed by Pope Francis, to open the Eucharistic Congress.
Grace to share
During the week, the Perpetual Pilgrims will be able to attend Mass, adoration and conferences, as well as serve in support of congress activities – “helping with speaker hospitality and transportation, connecting with various guests, and assisting with some expo hall engagement,” Joel Stepanek, Vice President of Programming and Administration for the National Eucharistic Congress, told Aleteia.
The Congress will end on Sunday, July 21, with a “great commissioning,” sending the expected 50,000-plus participants back to their communities with, as the Congress’ website says, “renewed passion for Christ and filled with grace to share.”
“Like a new Pentecost, we will be sent out to joyfully proclaim the Gospel in every corner of our nation,” says the website.
“At the end of the congress we are praying for and commissioning all attendees to be Eucharistic missionaries – which is less a formal designation and more of an internal disposition to live a missionary call rooted in the Eucharist,” Stepanek told Aleteia.
“In this next year, the Year of Mission in the Eucharistic Revival, there will be more formal aspects to being a Eucharistic Missionary," he said. "But at the congress, this commissioning is simply a call to go share the Gospel message of Jesus and invite people into a living relationship with Jesus through the Eucharist.”
Life as a pilgrimage
The Perpetual Pilgrims have reminded Stepanek that life itself is a pilgrimage, one in which we are striving towards heaven and trying to bring others with us.
Jack Krebs, a Perpetual Pilgrim on the Serra Route from the West Coast, said at the press conference that he is looking forward to the commissioning.
“We really are all pilgrims on our way to the promised land,” he said. “We’re all going back to our lives and will be able to really embrace Eucharistic mission there in a new way because we’ve been formed so uniquely in the Eucharist over the last few weeks.”
For Krebs, a recent graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, being in close proximity to the Eucharist while on the road, and receiving formation from chaplains who accompanied the pilgrims, has been a time of a growing personal relationship with Jesus.
“When the revival first hit back in 2022, I never thought it would mean a lot to me, but I really realized that the revival has to be taken very personally by each and every Catholic throughout the US in order for this fire to spread,” he said during Wednesday’s press conference.
Reflecting Christ to others
Matthew Heidenreich, a pilgrim on the Marian Route from the north, said his two-month experience has led him to ponder the relationship between the Eucharist as the Body of Christ with the understanding of the Church, the faithful, as the Body of Christ.
“There’s something really powerful about seeing so much of the Church over two months, of traveling through different local Churches, or dioceses, and really getting a feel for what the Church in America looks like, who the Church is, and understanding that we are the Body of Christ, and our point of unity is in the Eucharist,” said Heidenreich, a math major at the University of Alabama. “No matter how diverse we are and how diverse our expressions and understanding of our faith is, we all come together in the same body of Christ."
Said Heidenreich, “It’s been very powerful to see that lived out in countless communities.”
For Shayla Elm, a pilgrim on the southern Juan Diego Route, the experience drove home more strongly the idea of Christ’s presence. She said that after being with the Eucharist all day long, either accompanying it in processions and adorations or carrying it from place to place in the specially-rigged pilgrim van, the Lord’s absence was more starkly felt when the Eucharist was reposed in a church overnight, for example.
Elm, who works for the homeless outreach Christ in the City in Denver, said that so much “face time” with Christ in the Eucharist has really transformed her and her group of pilgrims.
“And that’s what people are getting to see in us,” she said. “They come up to the pilgrims and they are so excited to see us. We’re just normal people, but they see Jesus in us, and I think that’s in part because we’ve spent so much time with him that we get to reflect him, in a sense.”
The Juan Diego Route’s stop at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama, home to the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, drove home that point for her. The nuns spend their whole lives adoring the Blessed Sacrament.
“Their faces were just glowing,” Elm said. “They looked like the Eucharist.”
