As the National Eucharistic Congress comes to an end, there is a growing chorus of Church leaders calling for us to take up a eucharistic missionary life.
The average Catholic in the pew hearing the term “eucharistic missionary” might think this is a special role in the church performed by well-trained “holy people” in some far-flung region. And yet, every Catholic is called to be a missionary.
The faithful’s everyday call to the encounter that ultimately leads to the life of a eucharistic missionary is the topic of the book “For the Life of the World: Invited to Eucharistic Mission.” The work is co-authored by Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, who has been leading the U.S. bishops’ three-year National Eucharistic Revival, and Tim Glemkowski, the outgoing CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress, Inc.
A fruit of the bishops’ efforts, the work outlines the foundation of a eucharistic life that the faithful are called to participate in, and also concrete ways to embrace that call.
Bishop Cozzens offers a poignant re-emphasis on the need to encounter Jesus Christ as a living person in the Eucharist, drawing from Scripture and the saints. In one letter from Mother Teresa of Calcutta to her sisters, she asks “Do you really know the living Jesus — not from books, but from being with him in your heart? Have you heard the loving words he speaks to you? Ask for the grace, he is longing simply to give it. Until you can hear Jesus in the silence of your own heart, you will not be able to hear him saying ‘I thirst’ in the hearts of the poor.”
An understanding of one’s identity in the Eucharist follows this personal encounter with Jesus. Quoting the Second Vatican Council, the authors note that “the other sacraments, as well as with every ministry of the Church and every work of the apostolate, are tied together with the Eucharist and are directed toward it.”
A portion of the book is dedicated to understanding how to live in communion with one another, centered around Communion. This means loving, serving, and forgiving others, as well as joining in the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist by offering our trials and sufferings in union with the sacrifice of the Mass.
According to the great Carmelite spiritual writer Father Wilfrid Stinissen, “A great deal would happen in our lives if every time we celebrated the Eucharist we would place on the paten something of our own, something that we know is directed wrongly and therefore blocks us. … We imagine all too often that we must offer beautiful things to God. But the beautiful does not need to be offered to God. It is already in God’s sphere. It is the evil, that which has not yet found its right place, that must be lifted up and placed there, where it belongs, in God’s radiance.”
As the faithful draw closer to Jesus in the Eucharist, we are sent out on a mission to spread His message to others. The two are linked, the authors emphasize, writing, “The Eucharist is the heart of the Church’s mission, its source and summit. And mission is not an accidental quality, but essential to the reception of Jesus in the Eucharist. In every Mass, Jesus himself goes on mission, rushing down to the altar, to accomplish some definite purpose. Therefore, the final step in becoming a eucharistic missionary is to make his purpose in becoming the Bread of Life ours.”
In the inspiring words of the saints and pointing out ways to be missionaries In Jesus in our everyday lives, you can also acknowledge the climate of division in our world today.
“We believe that the Eucharist is the answer to the problems of our world,” they write, “because the Eucharist contains the entire spiritual wealth of the Church: Christ himself.” They ask the Lord to “form us in the eucharistic life that he himself lived, so that we might give ourselves, too, for the life of the world.”