If only churches were like ballparks. Just imagine: parking lots filled to capacity with pre-Mass bonding, excitable chants echoing all around, communal camaraderie in fashionable display, devoted attention to the action and joyous reverie at winning outcomes.
OK, it’s an admittedly unrealistic scenario, especially with all the other shenanigans taking place at professional games. But there’s something to “sport-uality” that merits attention.
That thought comes to mind when considering the church’s National Eucharistic Revival. The term conjures up those old-time tent meetings that drew large-scale crowds to hear spirit-filled preachers or, in more modern form, to listen to musical ministrations in concert halls.
Focused on the Eucharist, the Catholic version of a “revival” is billed as a grassroots response to the call of Jesus, “a movement to restore understanding and devotion to this great mystery here in the United States by helping us renew our worship of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.”
The movement originated, in part, as a response to the disturbing findings of a 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center which found that only 31% of Catholics believe the church’s teaching about what the Eucharist is, with more than two-thirds believing the bread and wine to be (just) symbols.
Those findings have since been rectified by a better-articulated CARA survey, the results of which indicate a much greater adherence to the traditional doctrine. Thus, a lack of knowledge about the church’s teaching is not the cause of the downslide in Eucharistic worship.
Yet, as Timothy O’Malley rightly suggests, we still need to renew the meaning of the Eucharist in Catholic life because it manifests “the deepest identity of the church.” In the current cultural climate, where religious belief is simply an individual option, he notes that “what we must present is an encounter with the living God, a persuasive vision of human flourishing grounded in the love of the triune God.”
For that renewal to become a real revival, how we celebrate Mass matters – for priests and parishioners alike. What we do each week at church offers an opportunity, far more than it meets an obligation. It’s the opportunity to experience “ecstasy.”
It’s not the kind of ecstasy found in ballparks or meeting tents or concert halls. But its power works in a similar way.
The celebration of Mass evinces an experience of ecstasy when we appreciate the event being celebrated for the supernatural feat that it is. During each Sunday ritual, we experience the sacrificial love of God in Jesus that redeems us and remains really present with us in the Eucharist through the power of the Holy Spirit.
For St. Francis de Sales, that sacramental experience is ecstatic in as much as it moves us to “go out of and beyond ourselves and remain there so as to be united with God” (Treatise on the Love of God, VII:4).
Pope Francis champions this Salesian notion of ecstasy in a recent apostolic letter, where he presents it as “the joyous exuberance of a Christian life that transcends the mediocrity of mere conformity” to religious obligations. This ecstasy engenders a coming alive again “that rediscovers the wellsprings of joy and avoids the temptation of self-centeredness.”
In Salesian spirituality, that ecstatic experience works in a threefold way at Mass and beyond. It changes our minds – an ecstasy of intellect — so that we can understand the bread we see to be a gift from heaven, from the God who provides life to us. It changes our hearts — an ecstasy of affection — so that we can appreciate what we eat as Jesus really present with us, leading us to take pleasure in the God within us. And it changes our lives — an ecstasy of action — so that we can be pleasing to God by living in obedience to the divine will in and through our day-to-day lives.
Our Masses may not reflect the fanatical enthusiasm of a ballpark or a concert hall. But there each Sunday we can share in a spiritual ecstasy, what Oblate Father James Langelaan describes as an intensity of divine love that has the power to move us out of our self-enclosure and self-centeredness. And by that weekly movement in our minds and hearts and acts, our own flourishing is more likely to bring about a real revival in the church.
Oblate Father Thomas Dailey holds the John Cardinal Foley Chair of Homiletics and Social Communications at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where he also directs the new Catholic Preaching Institute. On Dec. 4-5, he will be directing the Advent mission at St. Thomas More Oratory (@ University of Delaware), which explores this topic more fully.
