The Good, the Bad, and the Fiendishly Synodal at the National Eucharistic Congress

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The Good, the Bad, and the Fiendishly Synodal at the National Eucharistic Congress

Robert Morrison, Remnant Columnist | July 22, 2024


“Eucharistic revival and synodality go together. Or to put it another way, I believe that we will have true Eucharistic revival when we experience the Eucharist as the sacrament of Christ’s incarnation: as the Lord walking with us together on the way.” (Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, November 14, 2023)eblast prompt

In his essay about converting to Catholicism in The Road to Damascus, Evelyn Waugh wrote of the self-evident logic that led him to conclude that if Christianity was true, the Catholic Church must be correct:

“It was self-evident to me that no heresy or schism could be right and the Church wrong. It was possible that all were wrong, that the whole Christian revelation was an imposture or a misconception. But if the Christian revelation was true, then the Church was the society founded by Christ and all other bodies were only good so far as they had salvaged something from the wrecks of the Great Schism and the Reformation.”

Although the logic here is impeccable, we know that many otherwise intelligent Christians fail to accept it. Thus, at least in practice, non-Catholic Christians believe that all of Christianity languished in critical errors from the time that Jesus Christ charged the Apostles with propagating the religion until centuries later when the founder of their respective Protestant sect fabricated a new, “corrected” religion. As Waugh wrote, it is self-evident that this cannot be the case.

Unfortunately, we must apply the same analysis to the divide between Traditional Catholicism and the deformed religion spawned by the Vatican II revolution. Unlike the founders of the various Protestant sects, though, the proponents of the "Conciliar religion” did not have the decency to officially break from the Catholic Church. Indeed, as the pre-Vatican II popes had consistently warned, the enemies of God and the Catholic Church desired to infiltrate the Church for the purpose of corrupting the religion from within. As a result, we are left with what Waugh would recognize as a self-evidently preposterous situation: the followers of the Vatican II revolution are convinced that the beliefs and practices of all Christians are more or less good, except if those Christians happen to be Traditional Catholics who adhere to what the Church had always taught prior to the Council.

The revolutionaries might have completely crushed Traditional Catholicism decades ago were it not for the fact that the simple test given to us by Our Lord — that we must judge a tree by its fruits (Matthew 7:15-20) — always works against them. Everywhere we turn, we see the hideous fruits of the Vatican II revolution; at the same time, the tree of Catholic Tradition still bears abundant, holy fruits, even though the revolutionaries do all they can to try to chop it down. For this reason, the revolutionaries must go slower than they would like, and occasionally have to give their disaffected followers a taste of wholesome Traditional Catholic belief and practice to keep them from rejecting the revolution’s toxic fruits.

All of this was on full display at the recent National Eucharistic Congress. Taken in isolation, several aspects of the event were good because, as Waugh expressed it, they salvaged something of Traditional Catholicism:

• Generally reverent adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
  
• Some Gregorian chant and Traditional Catholic hymns
  
• In at least a few of the Novus Ordo Masses, the absence of female altar servers and Eucharistic ministers
  
• Some calls for the need for repentance
  

Will the attendees who were attracted by these Traditional Catholic practices return to their Novus Ordo parishes and encourage their pastors to make changes? If so, would they be met with favorable responses?

In all likelihood, any attendees who found something new and attractive in the elements of Traditional Catholicism incorporated at the National Eucharistic Congress will return to their parishes to find the same disappointing fruits of the Vatican II revolution which dominated the event. At one moment during the Saturday morning session, Katie Prejean McGrady (the emcee) captured the Protestant/Vatican II ethos of the National Eucharistic Congress by introducing a praise song from the Sarah Kroger Band as follows:

“My mom was raised Baptist, so we’re going to go back to my family roots for a second, we’re just gonna pray. . . . We’re gonna take a moment and just let the Lord come upon us, so if you would just close your eyes, let’s pray.”  (3:57)

It is certainly possible that those involved will earn high places in Heaven, but at no time prior to Vatican II would they have been permitted to stage such a performance in the name of “Catholic worship.”

The Fatima Center’s email regarding the National Eucharistic Congress put the matter as charitably as possible:

“You have likely heard of the surprisingly marvelous event occurring in Indianapolis, Indiana this weekend: the National Eucharistic Congress. It is immensely encouraging to see growing interest in Eucharistic Revival despite the many painful messages from our Church hierarchy that have resulted in ever greater irreverence, even disbelief, in Our Lord's True Presence in the Eucharist. . . . We commend the U.S. bishops for their pivotal role in organizing the 10th National Eucharistic Congress, a significant step towards addressing the decline in Eucharistic reverence and belief. However, it's important to remember that a return to Catholic Tradition is essential for fostering true Faith, regardless of the programs, talks, events, or money involved. Let's focus on the key aspect of Eucharistic reverence. As part of our rich history, Catholics must return to receiving Holy Communion from the priest only, on the tongue, and kneeling at a Communion rail. This is the first step towards reviving Eucharistic Faith.”

Unless there is a return to authentic Catholic Tradition, all efforts at “revival” are destined to fail. Accordingly, the best outcome of the National Eucharistic Congress would be if some attendees returned to Catholic Tradition after realizing that their Novus Ordo parishes can never satisfactorily provide the truth and beauty that they caught a glimpse of at the event.

Given the undeniable fact that the National Eucharistic Congresses’s most powerful figures — including Cardinals Wilton Gregory, Blase Cupich, and Luis Tagle — have absolutely no interest in leading souls to Catholic Tradition, it seems odd that the event would have taken any steps that could risk enkindling a love for the pre-Vatican II Faith. Many of the event’s organizers may have had noble motives, but it seems that we can find the rationale for Rome’s willingness to permit and support the congress in the words of Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States:

“Let’s be honest. We, all of us, we are afraid to go where the Spirit leads us. Is that not true. [Applause] Maybe this should be the main fruit of the Eucharistic revival. To be a people animated by the Spirit. A people able to listen to the voice of the Spirit. You remember when Pope Francis speaks about synodality, he says, the first step is precisely that: Listen to one another and listen to the Spirit in the person we listen [to]. The fruit of the Eucharistic revival.”

According to Cardinal Pierre, Rome’s desired fruit of the National Eucharistic Congress is not to increase devotion to Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist but to advance Francis’s Synod on Synodality. And as reported by the (often heretical) National Catholic Reporter, Cardinal Cupich’s presentation on the National Eucharistic Congress was also an overt promotion of the Synodal Church:

“The Eucharist can be thought of as a school for becoming a more synodal church, Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich said during a July 18 presentation at the National Eucharistic Congress.

Addressing a hotel ballroom packed with a diverse audience of Catholics, Cupich made several connections between the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, the central theme of the congress, and synodality.”

Thus, from the perspective of some of the National Eucharistic Congress’s most powerful figures, the event was valuable (or at least tolerable) to Rome because it could promote Synodality.

In his homily for the closing Mass of the National Eucharistic Congress, Cardinal Tagle was far more subtle in tying Eucharistic devotion to Synodality. He spoke of the great gift of Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist and our need to respond to that gift by sharing it with others — “a Eucharistic people is a missionary and evangelizing people.” Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with those ideas, but they are intricately tied to the Synod on Synodality, as we can glean from the recently released Instrumentum Laboris:

“Baptism is at the service of the dynamism of the likeness, and for this reason, it is not a punctual act closed at the moment of its celebration but a gift that must be confirmed, nourished and put to good use through the commitment to conversion, service to mission and participation in the life of the community. Christian initiation culminates, in fact, in the Sunday Eucharist, which is celebrated every week, a sign of the unceasing gift of grace that conforms us to Christ and makes us members of his Body and nourishment that sustains us on the path of conversion and mission. In this sense, the Eucharistic assembly manifests and nourishes the missionary synodal life of the Church.”

As we have seen, the “missionary spirit” of the Synodal Church (as distinct from the Catholic Church) does not consist in trying to teach souls to follow the Catholic religion but rather in “accompanying” people who decide that they do not want to accept the Church’s teachings. In fact, the Instrumentum Laboris further describes the Eucharist in terms of the participation of all Christians:

“Christian initiation culminates, in fact, in the Sunday Eucharist, which is celebrated every week, a sign of the unceasing gift of grace that conforms us to Christ and makes us members of his Body and nourishment that sustains us on the path of conversion and mission. In this sense, the Eucharistic assembly manifests and nourishes the missionary synodal life of the Church. In the participation of all Christians, in the presence of different ministries and the presidency of the bishop or priest, the Christian community is made visible, in which a differentiated co-responsibility of all for the mission is realised.”

This is the indispensable interpretive key for the Synod on Synodality and Rome’s goals with respect to the National Eucharistic Congress. Francis, Cupich, Tagle and the rest of the Synodal Church’s apostles use many of the same words that Catholics use, but they mean very different things. For them, the Eucharist should be shared with all baptized Christians as a means of promoting “unity,” which is unthinkable for actual Catholics who love the Blessed Sacrament.

In this light, we can consider Cardinal Tagle’s plea for us to share the Eucharist with others:

“We should not keep Jesus to ourselves, that is not discipleship, that is selfishness. The gift we have received we should give as a gift. . . . In his letter to me, Francis expressed the hope that the participants of the congress, fully aware of the universal gifts they receive from the heavenly food, may they impart them to others.”

The “others” here are not Catholics who may need a ride to Mass but those baptized non-Catholics, and non-practicing Catholics, who feel excluded from the Eucharist because they are prohibited by the Church’s rules from receiving Communion.

Again, it seems certain that many of the organizers and leaders of the National Eucharistic Congress were primarily interested in fostering true devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and perhaps had no interest in promoting the Synodal Church. But it is also certain that this was not the goal of Francis and his emissaries who had Synodality as their primary objective. For them, the event was an opportunity to “bless” their unholy Synodal Church by associating it with sincere (even if misguided at times) devotion to the Blessed Sacrament.

The Fatima Center’s email about the National Eucharistic Congress included a link to a 2003 article by the late John Vennari, in which he summarized the lesson that the event’s organizers and presenters ought to have delivered:

“How often have we heard even our Church leaders lament that ‘we have lost the sense of the sacred.’ This is one of the most astounding statements a Churchman can utter . . . as if it were some sort of mystery. Because the sense of the sacred is not lost, we know exactly where it is, and it could be recovered in every single parish church on earth tomorrow. The ‘sense of the sacred’ is found wherever safeguarding the reverence for the Blessed Sacrament is put into practice of paramount importance. . . It is found in the celebration of the Old Latin Tridentine Mass where profound reverence for the Blessed Sacrament is deeply ingrained into every moment of the Liturgy, and where Communion in the hand and ‘Eucharistic Ministers’ are still looked upon in horror with Catholic eyes, and are clearly recognized as the out-of-place, sacrilegious, non-Catholic practices that they are.”

Those who seek to restore the sense of the sacred without returning to the Traditional Latin Mass are like those Protestants who seek to find immutable Christian truth without returning to the sole ark of salvation established by Our Lord, the Catholic Church. It is no mere coincidence that Francis and his Synodal Church are just as hostile to the immutable Catholic Faith as they are to the Traditional Latin Mass. May their hatred for the things of God inspire us to draw ever more closely to the unfathomable treasures that Jesus Christ left to His Church, which are found where the Traditional Catholic Faith is preserved.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!