Speakers, group discussions, liturgies and prayer all combined to elaborate the meaning of the Eucharist and its pivotal role for Catholics in exercising their faith during a three-day eucharistic congress sponsored by the Diocese of Sacramento in celebration of the Jubilee Year.

Several hundred people participated in the congress March 24-26, with programs in English and Spanish. The event culminated March 26 with a eucharistic liturgy at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament highlighting the diversity of the diocesan Catholic community.

Bishop William K. Weigand proposed the eucharistic congress to respond locally to the invitation of Pope John Paul II to the worldwide church to focus on Jesus in the Eucharist during the Holy Year. It was also his hope, he said, that the congress would encourage further reflection by local Catholics on the Eucharist, initiated by his September 1999 pastoral letter, “Reflections on the Great Jubilee of Jesus Christ and the Eucharist.”

Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb of Mobile, AL, keynote speaker for the English-language portion of the congress, set its tone by making the connection between faith and Eucharist in an opening address to some 200 pastoral leaders who gathered March 24 at St. Anthony Parish in Sacramento.

The Eucharist “is filled with answers to our human hurts, inadequacies, doubts and even despair,” he contended. “Such answers rest in faith,” rather than the data from science and measurable experience “that form so many of our attitudes and practical assumptions in living today.”

Faith, in Catholic theology, he noted, is a total human affirmative response to divine truth not based on reason and scientific fact, but on God’s revelation through Jesus Christ.

“It is crucial to the gift of faith that brings salvation that we know the truth in such a way that not only makes us free (from error), but leaves us free in our response,” he said. “We are aware, sometimes painfully aware, that we are free to accept or reject God’s invitation.”

The archbishop, who is chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy and the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, noted that Catholics’ faith in the mystery of salvation, expressed so powerfully in the Eucharist, makes that mystery live today “in the concrete circumstances of our lives.”

The Eucharist present in churches, brought to the sick and the dying as a sign of Jesus’ healing, and exposed for benediction, he said, “are parts of our return in faith of the gifts Christ gives us that make up the mystery of our salvation.”

The Eucharist—the body and blood of Christ really, truly and substantially present— plays an irreplaceable role in the quality and perseverance of people’s faith, Archbishop Lipscomb said.

“Eucharist, and especially when shared as Communion, is part of the ‘personal self-revelation and self-communication of God’ which is the heart and substance of his love for us,” he said.

“Such a reality in the life of faith is a constant and effective safeguard and strength which enables faith to persevere under difficulties and changes, whether in one’s personal life or, on a wider stage, in the ongoing history and growth of the people of God as the body of Christ.”

The second day of the congress featured another address by Archbishop Lipscomb to English-language participants at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, as well as four workshops with speakers focusing on different aspects of the Eucharist.

A similar congress program in Spanish took place simultaneously at St. Rose Parish in Sacramento, with a keynote address by Bishop Jose de Trinidad Sepulveda, retired ordinary of San Juan de los Lagos in Mexico. Spanish-language workshop speakers included Sister Anna Maria Rizo, superior of the Sisters Catechists of Jesus Crucified, Father Rodolfo Llamas, parochial vicar of Holy Rosary Parish in Woodland, and Holy Rosary of Fatima Sister Soledad Castillo, pastoral assistant for Hispanic ministry at St. Vincent Ferrer Parish in Vallejo.

Jesuit Father John Coleman, in one English-language workshop, contended that the Eucharist—at its very heart—is a proclamation of social justice and must engage the transformation of the world if it wants to keep from being “a false or trivialized worship.”

For Catholics, social justice “finds its deepest roots in, and is fed by, a profoundly eucharistic imagination,” contended Father Coleman, who is professor of social values at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

“Both the Eucharist and action for social justice flow from the self-same metaphor of Christ: the body of Christ and Christ’s concomitant close identification with his people, especially any who suffer.”

Most churchgoers, however, find such claims provocative and miss any obvious links between the Eucharist and action for justice, Father Coleman said.

Pointing to passages in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Father Coleman stressed that “the very eucharistic assembly should itself be a concrete sign of justice—the community where all are welcome, where there is a radical equality despite race, wealth, social class and sex.”

Rarely are such assemblies to be found “in our larger societies,” he added. “This, I claim, is not something extraneous to the very heart of the Eucharist the church is called to celebrate…The assembly itself, called to be the body of Christ which shares one loaf, is an integral sign of the meal.”

Father Coleman suggested that local parishes for two reasons are the “privileged locale” for the renewal of a eucharistic piety tied to social justice. First, for most American Catholics, the parish is the only locale where they meet the church and its tradition. “If it is not happening in the parishes, it is, probably, not really happening in the American church,” he said.

The second reason—more deeply theological—he said is the church is meant to be localized. “If the Eucharist constitutes the legitimate church and the church is called to evangelize and continue the mission of Christ, then action on behalf of justice is constitutive of the real church, wherever it is found,” he noted. “But the real church is always found in the communities which celebrate the Eucharist.”

In a workshop on the Eucharist and the commitment to Christian unity, Atonement Father John Keane, director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs for the diocese, examined how the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is taught by the Roman Catholic and other Christian churches.

The “monumental” 1982 document of the World Council of Churches (representing more than 50 churches, including Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches), on baptism, Eucharist and ministry, expressed the churches’ faith in the real presence of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine, Father Keane noted.

That expression of faith “assures us that there are many Christian churches that recognize the Eucharist to be an important source of a spiritual energy,” he said. “For this reason, the Eucharist is called ‘the sacrament of love,’ constantly pointing more and more Christians to a future date when all Christians will share together from the same eucharistic table.”

While Catholics should understand the eucharistic faith of other churches, they should also know their own faith tradition well, Father Keane stressed.

“Sloppy ecumenism starts with a lack of knowledge about who I am as a Catholic Christian,” he said. “Such ignorance can blur differences and create tensions where they should never exist. What must be uppermost in our minds and hearts is a sincere respect not only for our own tradition as Catholics, but also for every other Christian tradition.”

Mercy Sister Katherine Doyle of the Auburn regional leadership team, in a workshop on the Eucharist and personal prayer and piety, told congress participants that within the eucharistic liturgy Catholics discover the roots and shape of personal prayer.

“All the dimensions are there: praise, thanksgiving, repentance and intercession,” she noted. “All our life flows into liturgy and flows from the liturgy; it is a ceaseless rhythm.”

She contended that authentic eucharistic spirituality “always flows into service of God’s people. It impels us to work for the dignity and good of those who are poor and oppressed. True eucharistic devotion animates eucharistic living.”

Workshop speakers John Rieschick, director of family life for the diocese, and his wife, Elvira Ramirez, a certified massage therapist, challenged congress participants to make the connections between Eucharist and family life.

“By looking at the holy, ordinary moments in our family from a eucharistic perspective, we can embrace the symbolism of nourishment, sharing meals, eating, living and dying for another, and rising from our brokenness,” Ramirez said.

“It took 11 years in religious life, marriage and having two children to help me begin to grasp Catholic teaching on the Eucharist as the center of Christian life,” she added. “I can no longer separate the experience of ordinary living from the ritual of lifting my sufferings and risings to God with my community of believers.”

She contended that Eucharist “is about the fullness in our hearts when we hold our newborn infant or embrace our grandparents. It is about the inner knowing I experience when I know that I am pleasing to God.”

Bishop Weigand presided at the multicultural closing eucharistic liturgy of the congress on March 26, which was preceded by a colorful procession by several hundred people from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church to the downtown cathedral. Concelebrating the Mass were Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Garcia, who gave the homily, Archbishop Sepulveda and numerous diocesan priests.

The Mass featured dancers from the Tongan Catholic community, readings proclaimed in English, Portuguese and Spanish, and hymns sung by the choir of Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs Church in Sacramento and the Sacramento Catholic Gospel Choir.

In his homily, Bishop Garcia referred to Pope John Paul’s insistence that Catholics “live the Eucharist, putting into practice the love that is revealed in the Eucharist.”

“My sisters, my brothers, it is the experience of Eucharist in our lives—the celebration of our lives—that will open us hopefully to see and accept Jesus in the cross, in the tabernacle, in God’s people and in each one of us,” he said. “That is how we form the body of Christ, witnesses to his love in the world.”

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