Final revival evening energizes thousands of people at Eucharistic congress to be ‘alive again’ in Christ

INDIANAPOLIS (OSV News) — From the first moments of the final nighttime revival session at Lucas Oil Stadium on July 20, an electricity coursed through the air with an intensity that surpassed any previous event of the National Eucharistic Congress.

Grammy-nominated Catholic musician Matt Maher led the crowd — estimated at more than 50,000 — in a joyful noise on the fourth day of a conference teaching Catholics how to better love Jesus — and how to better let him love them. The same crowd had arrived at the stadium, fueled by the most public witness of faith in the United States in decades outside of papal visits, after walking a mile-long Eucharistic procession through the streets of downtown Indianapolis.

That evening, Tim Glemkowski, CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress Inc., received a prolonged standing ovation when he took the main stage.

“If you’ve gone to all this trouble to get here to Indianapolis, I’m convinced it’s because the Lord has called you and personally appointed you to be here,” he said. “He’s after your heart and my heart. … He came for you. He came for you because he loves you.”

The speakers were received with standing ovations and cheers throughout the evening.

Fans of the popular TV series “The Chosen” had a surreal experience when Jonathan Roumie, beloved for his portrayal of Jesus on the series, read from a portion of the Gospel that was not included in the series.

“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” he read in the way he portrays Jesus on the show. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

After reading John 6:47-69, he thanked those in attendance for sharing that “very intimate moment in Scripture that I personally would have loved to see.”

Roumie gave his reflections in a flashy shirt — one he reportedly designed himself — featuring the famous quote, “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it,” from Catholic author Flannery O’Connor, who responded to someone describing the Eucharist as merely a symbol. The audience couldn’t see the back of Roumie’s shirt, which quoted John 6:53, with the key words in bold: “AMEN, AMEN, I say to you, unless you EAT the flesh of the Son of Man, and DRINK his blood, you have no LIFE in you.”

He told the audience that he had spent the past week filming the Last Supper scene for “The Chosen.” The prospect of such a portrayal, he said, had caused him great anxiety. “As a Catholic, I understand the gravity,” he said, of portraying the institution of the Eucharist that night.

“I understand the reality of what we believe and what that host represents” and “who it really is that we are going to receive,” he said, adding that receiving the Eucharist and attending Mass daily has changed his own life.

“The Eucharist is healing for me,” he said. “The Eucharist is peace for me, the Eucharist is my grounding for me. The Eucharist is his heart in me.”

Like many of the speakers at the conference, Catholic author and podcaster Gloria Purvis began by sharing a Eucharistic encounter she had. As a 12-year-old African-American girl at her Catholic school in Charleston, South Carolina, she stood before the monstrance with the Eucharistic Jesus on it. She recalled feeling “completely engulfed in flames,” but it didn’t hurt. And she was changed. She told her parents she was going to become Catholic.

“There is that unity in the Spirit because God spoke it,” she said.

Purvis listed a number of signs of unity in the Church: unity in celebrating the liturgy as a community, unity in the leadership of the Pope, unity as one family of God (church militant, church suffering and church triumphant), and the example of the martyrs.

She also spoke of signs of division in the church: the rejection of the Pope, the preference for idols of worldly power (such as placing loyalty to political parties above loyalty to Jesus Christ) and the sin of racism.

She also suggested that sacrifices, prayers, fasting and almsgiving would serve as balm for the wounds of division that mark the body of Christ.

“Let our testimonies, those we say we love, permeate everything we do and say—and everything we are willing to do for the glory of the Lord and the growth of His Church,” Purvis said.

In the final keynote of the conference, Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minn., and founder of the Catholic media apostolate Word on Fire, urged the audience to leave the stadium with “the light of Christ” to transform society. It is the job of the laity to bring the light of Christ to the secular world, he said.

Bishop Barron quoted the words of St. Catherine of Siena: “Be who God intended you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

“God tells us who we are to be, how we are to live — everything else is a footnote,” Bishop Barron said. “The biggest problem in our culture today is the culture of self-invention: ‘I decide who I am, I decide who I am, I decide what my life is, I decide what it’s all about — even my gender is my choice.’”

Obedience is one of the evangelical counsels, along with poverty and chastity, observed by men and women in religious orders. The bishop, however, urged the laity to observe these counsels in their state of life as well.

“We have consistently obeyed” Jesus’ command “to do this in memory of me throughout the centuries,” Bishop Barron said, and “despite our failures,” we believe that Jesus “is not just a wisdom figure, but rather God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. … That is the basic theology of the church, the theology of the True Presence. That is why we are here.”

Bishop Barron said that “we don’t pay enough attention” to other commandments of Jesus.

On chastity, he said the church’s teaching is not puritanical but is about living one’s sex life in “a morally and spiritually responsible way” and placing “one’s entire sexuality under the care of love.”

“If, starting tonight, 70 million Catholics decided to live by chastity, abortion, sexual abuse, the objectification of men and women, the culture of one-night stands – all of that would be undermined,” he said.

Bishop Barron said that when so much of the world is in pursuit of wealth, pleasure, power and honor, poverty helps us to detach ourselves from these things to “live in Christ.” As a guide to living poverty, he pointed to the teaching of Pope Leo XIII: “When the demands of necessity and decency are met, it is a duty to give to the poor out of what is left over.”

Eucharistic adoration concluded the evening powerfully, with Bishop David L. Toups of Beaumont, Texas, carrying the Eucharist to the center altar on the stadium floor. He knelt before the Eucharistic Lord in the monstrance blessed by Pope Francis for 40 minutes, with stretches of silence giving way to songs of adoration by Maher and fellow musician Sarah Kroger.

People knelt, stood and sat during the worship, many with their hands raised in praise. During the final period of silence, a woman’s spontaneous song filled the ground floor, while a group elsewhere in the stadium sang a hymn.

After the blessing, Bishop Toups left the stadium in procession with the Eucharist, after which Maher started the song “Alive Again”.

“I’m alive, I’m alive because he’s alive,” Maher sang, his voice booming through the stadium. “Amen, Amen! Let my song join with the one who never ends!”

This story was written by Julie Asher, Lauretta Brown, Maria-Pia Negro Chin, Gretchen R. Crowe and Maria Wiering.