National Eucharistic Congress: energizing a new generation?

July 25, 2024

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CWN Editor's Note: Stephen White, the executive director of The Catholic Project at Catholic University, reports on how his experience at the National Eucharistic Congress changed his expectations:

I am not, generally, a fan of large gatherings. I dislike crowds, am suspicious of mass displays of emotion (particularly where religion is concerned) and have a life-long aversion for that genre of contemporary music known as “praise and worship.”
But being there at the Congress – kneeling in the utter silence of Lucas Oil Stadium with 50,000 other souls, adoring the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament – such criticisms seem almost as comically irrelevant as my own prior expectations.
He was there and we all knew He was there. That is what mattered.

I have heard many attendees compare this Eucharistic Congress to the Denver World Youth Day in 1993. That WYD energized a generation of American Catholics and continues to bear fruit in the Church in the United States today. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that this Eucharistic Congress was, itself, a fruit of that World Youth Day more than three decades ago.

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