Following the promulgation of their 2021 document, The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church, the Bishops of the United States have called for a national Eucharistic revival. Culminating three years of “grassroots revival of devotion and belief in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist,” a national Eucharistic Congress will take place in 2024—the first of its kind in nearly 50 years. The Bishops “believe that God wants to see a movement of Catholics across the United States, healed, converted, formed, and unified by an encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist—and sent out in mission ‘for the life of the world.’”

RESPONDING TO THE CALL

In response to this call to Eucharistic renewal and revival, The Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal and The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology co-sponsored a conference on “The Holiness of God and the Mystery of the Eucharist” at Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida, February 2-4, 2023.

THE MYSTERY OF GOD’S HOLINESS IN THE EUCHARIST

Recent years have witnessed a loss of the sense of God’s holiness and how the faithful enter into the mystery of God’s holiness in the Eucharist. When Moses encountered God in the burning bush, he was told to remove his shoes for “the place where he was standing was holy ground.” When Isaiah described his vision of God, he began with “holy, holy, holy.” John in Revelation describes Jesus as “the holy one, the true one” and the new heavens and the new earth simply as “the holy city.” Standing at the heart of the mysteries of creation and redemption, God’s holiness grounds the new covenant relationship established in Jesus Christ’s gift of himself in the Eucharist.

This conference invited theologians to draw upon the entire theological patrimony of the Catholic Church to rediscover and retrieve the revelation of God’s holiness and the mystery of the Eucharist.