Catholic Workers Bring Messages of Peace, Repentance to National Eucharistic Congress 

The Catholic Worker had a tiny presence at the National Eucharistic Congress last week in Indianapolis, with about twenty Workers and pilgrims coming together in a park near the Indiana Convention Center for a picnic supper and roundtable.

But despite those small numbers, most of the 50,000 people attending the Congress got to hear about the Catholic Worker Movement and Dorothy Day.

Martha Hennessy, one of Dorothy Day’s granddaughters and a peace activist in her own right, spoke to about 5,000 people during a breakout session on Friday. Catholic Workers from South Bend, Indiana, distributed copies of The Catholic Worker newspaper, Dorothy Day holy cards, and postcards with artwork connecting the Eucharist with care for the unhoused and hungry. And on the final night of the event, Bishop Robert Barron (of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and Word on Fire fame) delivered an address that used one of Dorothy’s columns as a launching point.

The National Eucharistic Congress was the capstone event in a three-year Eucharistic Revival organized by the U.S. Catholic bishops to revitalize devotion to the Eucharist. The five-day event drew thousands of clergy, religious, and lay Catholics. Daytime sessions featured Catholic speakers, liturgies, and interactive experiences. The evening sessions at Lucas Oil Stadium featured speakers, prayer, worship music, and Eucharistic adoration.

Hennessy’s 10-minute address took place as part of a longer, 90-minute breakout session on Friday morning. For most of her address, which you can read or watch on CatholicWorker.org, Hennessy simply read the words of her grandmother about the Eucharist, including a number of short excerpts from Dorothy’s newspaper columns and diary entries.

“We are nourished by (Jesus’s) flesh, that we may grow to be other Christs,” Hennessy said, reading from a diary entry. “I believe this literally, just as I believe the child is nourished by the milk from his mother’s breast.”

But Hennessy began by reading an excerpt from Dorothy’s “Bread for the Hungry” address to the 41^st International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia on August 6, 1976. The section that Hennessy read included Dorothy’s noting the significance of the day as the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, along with her urging the Congress to practice repentance for the “holocaust” of Japanese lives.

“I plead in this short paper that we will regard…all our Masses today as an act of penance, begging God to forgive us,” she said.

Repentance and the need for communal repentance ended up being the focus of much of the conversation at the Catholic Worker roundtable held in a nearby park that evening. About 20 Catholic Workers and Congress attendees gathered for a picnic of dinner of pizza, sandwiches, and lentil soup provided by the South Bend Catholic Worker. The roundtable discussion began with a reading of Dorothy’s “Bread for the Hungry” address, followed by a wide-ranging discussion.

Later that evening, Sister Josephine Garrett addressed tens of thousands of pilgrims gathered at Lucas Oil Stadium. Garrett, a trauma-trained licensed counselor and Sister of the Holy Family of Nazareth, began by noting the spirit of joy, gratitude, and generosity at the Congress. The heart of her talk, though, focused on what she called the “two legs” of the Eucharistic revival the U.S. Catholic bishops have called for: first, reverence for Christ in the Eucharist and in our neighbor, “especially those we don’t always like and who are not always consoling or pleasing to us.” The second leg, she said, was repentance.

“We need each other, every member of the body of Christ is necessary, amen? Every single member of the body of Christ is necessary and when you or I fail to invite we not only do harm to that person, we do harm to ourselves because we are fellow members of the body,” she said. “No one lives alone, no one sins alone, no one is saved alone.” (See this portion of her talk on YouTube.)

“We need to be corporately repentant as a people,” Garrett went on, “and our bishops and pastors, I believe you have a special place in corporate repentance by virtue of your priesthood.”

While Garrett did not name any specific corporate sins the Church should repent from, one of the following night’s speaker, Gloria Purvis, specifically called out political idolatry and racism. Purvis, a scholar, journalist, and Catholic media personality, was abruptly let go from her EWTN radio show, Morning Glory, after speaking out about race in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Purvis and her co-host are Black.

“Let me just say we reject Christ when we prefer idols of temporal power. And I’ve seen that, and I’m seeing that, where we put political party allegiance ahead of allegiance to Christ,” Purvis said.

She went on to address the sin of racism at length: “Stop the deception. Reject the devil’s lies and temptation. We must get away from this idea that racism, when we talk about this sin, only attacks one group. No, it attacks all of us because we are a family. Those of us deceived by it are behaving beneath our dignity as God made us. Those of us who are the victims of it are suffering in a way that shows that people treat us beneath who we are. No, we are one human family, and we, as believers, thanks be to God, have the ability to make repair for these moments of disunity.

“(I hear people say,) things like, ‘I didn’t do that.’ I said, ‘Uh, you believe in Christ, you follow Christ. Did he do any of that? But yet he got on the cross and died for you. How are you going to say you won’t make any repair or do any atonement for the brokenness in this world?’” Purvis said.

Later in the evening, Bishop Robert Barron invoked the words of Dorothy Day to call Congress attendees to a higher standard of holiness.

“You know, Dorothy Day has long been a hero of mine, and back in the 1950s Dorothy Day complained about something,” Barron said. “She said there was a kind of two-tiered spirituality in the Catholic Church. There was a spirituality of the commandments that was for the laity, and it meant, you know, follow the basic Ten Commandments and that’s all we can really expect of you.

“And then there was what she called a ‘counsel spirituality’ for the clergy and the religious and so on. What’s that? Well, the evangelical counsels: poverty, chastity, obedience….

“Dorothy Day hated that. She hated that distinction…. She knew (clergy and consecrated religious) live those things out in a distinctive way, but she also knew: no, no, there’s not a two-tiered spirituality in the Church: the laity, too, were called to heroic sanctity.”

While Barron didn’t cite his source, Day did write about the evangelical counsels frequently throughout her life, including in a series of Advent reflections in 1966.

Barron exhorted Congress attendees to practice the poverty of detachment from pleasure, wealth, and status. “If we live in Christ, we live in the center of the wheel (of fortune), detached from the goods of the world. Then God can work through us, grace can flow through us into the world and that’s the poverty, if you want, that all of you are called to. That’s the poverty that will indeed change the world,” Barron said.

He went on to quote Pope Leo XIII’s admonition that once one’s basic needs are met, “everything else you own belongs to the poor.”

“Now, can I suggest to you, that’ll change your life if you let that sink in,” Barron said.

While 50,000 pilgrims streamed into Lucas Oil Stadium to watch Purvis, Barron, and actor Jonathan Roumie, with another 54,000 watching the event livestream, the Martha Hennessy gathered again in a nearby park for a second picnic and roundtable discussion, this time focused on Dorothy’s September, 1945, article reacting to the bombing of Hiroshima. The gathering provided a “refuge” from the larger gathering, Hennessy later said, and reflected “the Little Way” of St. Therese of Lisieux.

She expressed gratitude that “the silence of the U.S. Church in the face of war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza was penetrated in a small but crucial way as I read from Dorothy’s quotes that we must repent of our sins of wide scale violence in our culture.”

You can read more about Martha Hennessy’s address at the National Catholic Reporter: At eucharistic congress, peace activist Martha Hennessy stresses ‘presence of God’

Renée D. Roden contributed to this article.