Gulf Pine Catholic

Gulf Pine Catholic • January 3, 2025 7 228-539-9800 www.RiemannFamily.com Gulfport Pass Christian West Jackson County Biloxi Long Beach Hancock County Year End 2024 Eucharistic Revival From page 1 Jonathan Day, with his wife and six children, ages 4 to 14, traveled the entire northern pilgrimage route alongside its eight perpetual pilgrims and their chaplains. A political science professor at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois, Day said that he had hoped the journey would allow his chil- dren to see many Catholics express their faith and “to give our family the experience of following Jesus no matter how hard it gets.” Those hopes were fulfilled. While the adventure was personally edifying, Day said he thinks “the full fruit” of the pilgrimage is yet to be revealed. “There’s so much that’s going to happen over the years, decades … that we will eventually realize that that was because of the pilgrimage,” he said. The congress’s immediate impact is perhaps felt most acutely at St. John the Evangelist, which, thanks to its location directly across from the main entrance of the Indiana Convention Center, served as the congress’s perpetual adoration chapel. Eucharistic adorers at St. John continue to pray for the thousands upon thousands of handwritten petitions placed in the sanctuary during the con- gress. The petitions speak to deep needs: healing for a broken marriage; recovery from cancer; forgive- ness for a long-ago abortion. The petitions fill bas- kets, and adorers slowly revisited them, one small handful of papers at a time. Father Rick Nagel, St. John’s pastor, said he gets phone calls and hears confessions from Catholics who have returned to practicing the faith because of the congress. Meanwhile, his parish has 52 people attending classes for the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults with plans to be baptized or enter full communion with the Catholic Church at Easter -- its largest number in mem- ory, and more than dou- ble the average. Several attribute their interest in the church directly to the congress, and others have extraordinary stories of how they encountered the church, Father Nagel said. What’s most remarkable to the longtime pastor is that several OCIA participants are seeking to join the church despite not knowing any practicing Catholics -- a huge deviation from the norm that the priest attributes to the congress’s far-reaching graces. God’s grace, he said, “just got showered upon this country and certainly the city” of Indianapolis, he said. Bishop Cozzens said he has heard anecdotally that there’s an uptick in OCIA classes around the country, although actual numbers are not expected to be available until spring 2025. While some of the congress’s immediate impact is evident, Eucharistic revival is a generational proj- ect, Bishop Cozzens said. Another National Eucharistic Pilgrimage was planned for early sum- mer 2024 from Indianapolis to Los Angeles. Bishop Cozzens is involved in planning the next U.S. con- gress, and he expects its year to be announced some- time in 2025. From there, national congresses may be held every three or four years, like the Vatican- supported International Eucharistic Congresses , he said. However, for Bishop Cozzens -- and many, many others -- the 2024 congress, “has become one of those experiences that will kind of mark your life,” he said. Maria Wiering is senior writer for OSV News. Jesus is the path and destination for Jubilee pilgrims, pope says BY JUSTIN MCLELLAN Catholic News Service VATICAN CITY ( CNS ) -- Pope Francis called on Catholics to focus their Holy Year 2025 pilgrim- ages on Jesus Christ, who is both the path and desti- nation for Christian hope. At his general audience Dec. 18, the pope began a new series of talks on “Jesus Christ our hope,” which he announced will the theme for his weekly catechesis throughout the Jubilee Year, which is set to begin with the opening of the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica Dec. 24. Jesus, “is the destination of our pilgrimage, and He himself is the way, the path to be traveled,” he said in the Vatican audience hall. Walking across the stage to his seat rather than using a wheelchair as he had previously done, Pope Francis stopped to pray before a relic of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the 19th-century French saint who was the subject of an apostolic exhortation published by the pope in 2023. After aides read the genealogy of Jesus from St. Matthew’s Gospel in various languages, the pope explained that “the genealogy is a literary genre that is a suitable for conveying a very important mes- sage: No one gives life to him -- or herself but receives it as a gift for others.” Unlike the genealogies in the Old Testament, which mention only male figures, St. Matthew includes five women in Jesus’ lineage, Pope Francis noted. Four of the women are united “by being for- eigners to the people of Israel,” the pope said, high- lighting Jesus’ mission to embrace both Jews and Gentiles. The mention of Mary in the genealogy “marks a new beginning,” Pope Francis said, “because in her story it is no longer the human creature who is the protagonist of generation, but God himself.” In St. Matthew’s Gospel, the genealogy typically describes lineage by stating that a male figure “became the father of” a son. However, when it comes to Mary, the wording shifts: “of her was born Jesus who is called the Messiah.” Through His lineage to David, Jesus is destined to be the Messiah of Israel, but because He is also descended from Abraham and foreign women, He will become the “light of the Gentiles” and “savior of the world,” Pope Francis said citing Scripture. “Brothers and sisters, let us awaken in ourselves the grateful memory toward our ancestors,” he said, “and above all let us give thanks to God who, through mother church, has begotten us to eternal life, the life of Jesus, our hope.” In his greeting to pilgrims after his main talk, Pope Francis briefly reflected on his Dec. 15 daytrip to the French island of Corsica to close a theology conference on popular religiosity. “The recent trip in Corsica, where I was so warmly welcomed, particularly struck me for the fervor of the people” who do not treat faith as a “pri- vate matter,” he said, as well as “for the number of children present, a great joy and a great hope.”