INDIANAPOLIS (RNS) — As they sent more than 50,000 Catholics who attended the National Eucharistic Congress on their way, the bishops who organized the five-day event that ended Sunday (July 21) may have sensed they were preaching to the proverbial choir. But that didn’t mean they wanted the faithful to be comfortable.“This great revival will have been a failure if we don’t change our society,” Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, Bishop Robert Barron told the crowd that packed Lucas Oil stadium Saturday night.
The event was the culmination of a vision Barron had in 2019, when he chaired the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, after a 2019 Pew Research Center study suggested that only a third of Catholics believed the church teaching that Jesus is actually present, not just symbolically, in the bread and wine offered at Mass.
While later studies cast doubt on Pew’s findings, the bishops pressed on to create a three-year evangelization campaign, which began in 2022, also seeking to address low Mass attendance and Catholic disaffiliation.
Catholic bishops sing ‘How Great Is Our God’ during the National Eucharistic Congress, Saturday, July 20, 2024, at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)
At the congress, the 10th such event in U.S. Catholic history and the first since the 1940s, pilgrims attended talks, confession, Masses, a service opportunity and nightly Eucharistic adoration, which …
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The event was the culmination of a vision Barron had in 2019, when he chaired the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, after a 2019 Pew Research Center study suggested that only a third of Catholics believed the church teaching that Jesus is actually present, not just symbolically, in the bread and wine offered at Mass.
While later studies cast doubt on Pew’s findings, the bishops pressed on to create a three-year evangelization campaign, which began in 2022, also seeking to address low Mass attendance and Catholic disaffiliation.
Catholic bishops sing ‘How Great Is Our God’ during the National Eucharistic Congress, Saturday, July 20, 2024, at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)
At the congress, the 10th such event in U.S. Catholic history and the first since the 1940s, pilgrims attended talks, confession, Masses, a service opportunity and nightly Eucharistic adoration, which …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]