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October 31, 2019Five years into building disciples of Jesus Christ with a slow and steady pace, Saint John Nepomuk in Yukon has started to see remarkable changes.
At this Catholic parish in the heart of the Bible Belt, Eucharistic adoration is growing, parish fellowship is strengthening, and Catholics who may have felt like an island in a sea of Protestantism are now going forth with confidence to carry out the Gospel.
The parish’s ongoing transformation comes at a time when the Catholic Church in the United States is faced squarely with the problem that most Catholics do not believe in what the Church means by the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.
According to a Pew survey published July 23, seven out of 10 Catholics believe the Eucharist is a symbol of Jesus, but they do not believe what the Church actually teaches and has taught since its inception: that the bread and wine “actually becomes” Jesus Christ – Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.
At the same time, however, Pew’s survey revealed a problem that could not be addressed simply by Sunday catechesis on the Eucharist. Most Catholics (63 percent) who went to Church weekly actually believed in the Church’s teaching – but the vast majority of Catholics do not go to church regularly. Among these, upward of 75 percent did not believe Jesus is really present in the Eucharist.
Yet, there are parishes in the United States, such as Saint John Nepomuk, reinvigorating faith in, and love for, Jesus in the Eucharist with a renewal of authentic Catholic discipleship and parish fellowship.
Mission: Discipleship
Parishioner Ann Cook, a staff member at the Catholic Pastoral Center, told the Register the discipleship process at Saint John Nepomuk – a lay-led initiative in response to Archbishop Paul Coakley’s 2013 pastoral letter “Go Make Disciples” – aimed to slowly and deliberately go about “building disciples who are equipped to build disciples” over the course of a year. At the end of each process, the discipleship group leaders identify among the formed disciples other potential leaders to form new groups that will train more disciples.
Cook said the parish and school are now seeing the fruit of this fifth generation of “spiritual multiplication.” Eucharistic adoration has gone from one evening per month to adoration every Friday from 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. as well as on Wednesday evenings. More people also are going to confession.
The impact is seen at Mass, Cook explained.
“I hear a lot more from new parishioners, or people who are visiting, or even people who have been coming for a while, but haven't necessarily felt connected, now saying, ‘Your parish is so hospitable: When we walk in, we were welcomed,’” she said. “That’s not something that would have been going on (before the discipleship process): looking for the outsider.”
Father Rex Arnold, pastor at Saint John Nepomuk, told the Register that, at first, he hoped to see an “explosion of missionary outreach activity,” but now he sees the growth is actually built to last.
Parishioners are suggesting new outreach efforts to people with mental illness and addictions, particularly pornography, and are actively discerning where Christ is calling them to live their baptism.
And, Fr. Rex said the discipleship process channels the genius of the early Church. “It’s small faith groups coming together, learning what the Church teaches, and having a personal relationship with the Lord.”
Worship and fellowship
According to Stephen Bullivant, the director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at Saint Mary University in London and author of “Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America Since Vatican II,” one of the overlooked causes for the collapse of Catholic faith, such as Mass attendance and belief in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, is the loss of a “social architecture” in which the faith is lived and passed on.
“We need to work out what we can do to solve that transmission problem,” sociologist professor Bullivant told the Register.
Bullivant said that in the early 20 th century, Catholics in the United States and the United Kingdom had “a social architecture in which transmitting the faith, and being strong in it, is easy and natural.” The Catholic parish, he said, was not simply a center of religious activity, but often “your whole social life,” from Rosary sodalities to drama club to sports teams.
These Catholic communities started to break down with greater mobility (and greater prosperity) encouraged by the GI Bill, suburbanization and automobile ownership. Bullivant said no one should romanticize these bygone communities, which could be mired in poverty and insulated along ethnic lines, but they do provide insights into key elements missing from Catholic life today.
“Catholic parishes have been becoming less and less genuine communities,” he said.
“People don’t necessarily know the other people at Mass,” he said. “And even if you do know them at Mass, you don’t also know them outside of that context.”
Bullivant said “genuine communities were crumbling” at a time when Catholic leaders were de-emphasizing Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist, insisting that he was just as present in the community as he was in the tabernacle. At the same time, he said, many of these same leaders in the 1960s insisted on getting rid of “all these sorts of little ways in which the faith was weaved into the day,” such as Friday fasts and traditional communal devotions, on the basis that they detracted from the Mass.
“That’s just not bad sacramental theology; it’s also a bad kind of social psychology,” he said.
Bullivant said “niche parishes” such as Latin Mass communities, Vietnamese parishes or Syro-Malabar (Eastern Catholic) parishes, have developed genuine forms of Catholic community because they bring people together with a common identity among those who are invested in it. Bullivant said there also is a movement among orthodox Catholics to create intentional “Benedict option” parish communities where the bonds among Catholics intentionally extend outside of worship.
“There’s a sort of particular reason that people make the effort to be involved, and that is a genuine community,” he said, “where people have very serious and meaningful friendship.”
A Eucharistic theology of fellowship
The contemporary Catholic experience of people rushing to the parking lot to escape barely an hour of worship on Sunday does not truly manifest a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, but “the appropriation of a more Protestant ‘me and my Jesus thing,’” explained Bishop Steven Lopes of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, a Catholic diocese with Anglican traditions for North America established by Benedict XVI.
Bishop Lopes, an authority in Eucharistic theology and former official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, told the Register in an interview that the Catholic understanding puts “equal accents on the seriousness of worship and the seriousness of fellowship.”
This parish fellowship “flows from” the Eucharist, he explained, and is necessary for Catholics’ intentional discipleship of Jesus Christ, but it also “leads (them) back to” the Eucharist.
“Because once you’re interacting with your brothers and sisters in Christ, you’re going to be more aware of their needs, more aware of the human brokenness and relationships and whatnot,” he said. “And, then out of love for them, of course, when you go back to Mass, you’re bringing their prayers, their intentions and your concern for them.”
The bishop said parish communities in the ordinariate are deliberately smaller in size than most diocesan Catholic parishes and have “a real emphasis on spending time together, not just getting to Mass and then going home.”
Bishop Lopes said the worship-fellowship dynamic of the Mass always goes “hand in hand.”
The Holy Spirit, he said, is transforming the bread and wine into Jesus Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity at the consecration of the Mass. But, also, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit transforms in a way the assembly into the Body of Christ, “where we start to recognize each other, not as strangers, not as individuals who have nothing to do with my life, but as members of the same body.”
“This is what happens at Mass,” he said. “And, so to celebrate Mass means, of course, to reverently receive the Eucharist, but also reverently to receive your neighbor as members of the same body of the Church.”
Bishop Lopes said Catholics who “leave the Church” often are not really making an active decision so much as dropping out.
“The biggest driver of that is the feeling of anonymity, the feeling of ‘that if it doesn’t matter if I’m there, then it doesn’t matter if I’m not there,’” he said.
Catholic parishes, particularly large parishes, Bishop Lopes said, have to be “more creative on how they form that sense of intentional community and intentional discipleship around the Mass.”