Introduction to Real Presences

July 11, 2024. Feast of St. Benedict of Nursia.

​

The last Eucharistic Congress that took place in the US was of the international variety. It was in 1976, America’s bicentennial year, an ecclesial gathering of over 1.5 million people in the most historically consequential of American cities, Philadelphia, PA. Future saint Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day were panelists at a session on Women and the Eucharist. Future Pope and saint John Paul II gave a rousing homily on the liberating properties of the Eucharist at a packed night time mass at Veterans Stadium.  President Gerald Ford, a Protestant man of deep, quiet faith, spoke powerfully at JFK Stadium about the Catholic Church as a “hospital for the soul” and a global force for peace.

​

Over the last year, we at the Hank Center have been thinking about edifying ways to celebrate the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress taking place next week in Indianapolis—the first Eucharistic Congress in the US since 1976, and the first explicitly National Eucharistic Congress since the 1941 meeting in St. Paul, MN. In late May, we sent invitations to a host of Catholic writers and thinkers, friends of the Center, all. Our idea was simple: to publish, just ahead of the Congress, a series of brief reflections on personal encounters with the Eucharist. The added element is that we invited our authors to reference an image, painting, tract, essay, passage, poem, novel, film, etc., that awakened and deepened their understanding of the Sacrament, that enriched eucharistic intimacy, contemplation, and relationship. The response surpassed our hopes by an almost incalculable degree. The essays assembled here are what we have been calling “pure gold” these last couple of weeks—and they are kindly offered for your consideration, enjoyment, and enrichment.

​

The sacramental imagination is an integral feature of Catholic life; and both the possibilities and reach of Holy Communion—of the Eucharist, which the Second Vatican Council rightly characterizes as “source and summit” of Christian life—is as variegated as each person. As Catholics, we are not all called to be cookie-cutter replicas of each other; but we are called to live in communion. And we are called to be saints.

​

The Hank Center understands how imagination—and how the arts of the beautiful (like poetry, painting, and literature)—play an immensely influential role in understanding these kinds of healthy tensions. We always seek to cultivate conversations that explore how sacramental time and experience relate to chronological time; and we always seek to explore how this ongoing dynamic reveals the gift of God incarnate—of Jesus who both models a way of life in the Gospel and who is the eschatological redeemer of humankind.

​

As Pope Francis proclaims, a Christian is "a woman, a man of the Eucharist.” He counsels further that the Eucharist, “although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” Unfortunately, the Eucharist has become an unfortunate battleground upon which larger issues about the Catholic Church are contested. Many Catholics, as recent Pew and CARA studies show, lack a basic (and critical) understanding about what the Real Presence is and how it relates to the bodily presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Just as many other Catholics explain the Real Presence away as some type of bedtime story for naïve believers possessed by a shabby intellect. Let us hear from Dorothy Day and her 1934 response to this all-too-normal phenomenon:

​

It took me a long time as a convert to realize the presence of Christ as Man in the Sacrament. He is the same Jesus Who walked on earth, Who slept in the boat as the tempest arose, Who hungered in the desert, Who prayed in the garden, Who conversed with the woman by the well, Who rested at the house of Martha and Mary, Who wandered through the cornfields, picking the ears of corn to eat.

​

In many ways, the essays collected here seek to make a similar response. They seek to ground the reality of the God who walked—and walks— among us on the map of personal encounter and communal experience. As Nobel Laureate Francois Mauriac wrote in is indispensable Holy Thursday: An Intimate Remembrance (1931), “This God who, as the psalmist said, built His tabernacles in the sun, now establishes Himself in the very core of the flesh and the blood…Light is in the world as in the days of St. John the Baptist, and the world does not know it.” We pray that the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis will be an occasion to help us remember this axial truth, and help to revitalize Eucharistic thinking and participation. Much depends on this in a world so in need of light, so in need of the real presence of the living God.

​

Another Frenchman, Frederic Ozanam, perhaps anticipating the hyperactive speed of life today, counseled, "The best way to economize time is to 'lose' half an hour each day attending Holy Mass." Dear reader, it is our hope that you “lose” a half hour here in these superb essays. 

 

Hear yet my paradox: Love, when all is given,
To see Thee I must [see] Thee, to love, love;
I must o'ertake Thee at once and under heaven
If I shall overtake Thee at last above.
You have your wish; enter these walls, one said:
He is with you in the breaking of the bread

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, closing stanza from “The Half-way House” (1865)