Call for a 'new evangelization'
In October 1998, the Holy Father told a group of visiting U.S. bishops that the coming Holy Year 2000 is, above all, a call to conversion, and that the liturgical renewal promoted by Vatican II should be "the prime agent of the wider renewal of Catholic life" (BCL Newsletter, November 1998). He touched on the same idea in Mexico City earlier this year when he urged the Church in America to embark on a "new evangelization." The root of this new evangelization, said the Holy Father, must be a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. And so the question then becomes: Where do we most intimately encounter Christ? Well, we find Him in the Scriptures and prayer, of course -- but John Paul II also points to the unique presence of Jesus in the liturgy, and especially to His real presence in the Blessed Sacrament (Church in America, 12).

Encountering Jesus by making the Eucharist the center of our lives may be a bigger challenge than we suspect. Many of us as Catholics, sometimes even among the clergy, tend to take the Eucharist for granted. But only through a deeper understanding of -- and reverence for -- the Eucharist can we enter into the joy of the Lord which the Great Jubilee celebrates. Moreover, leading others to this great encounter with the Lord is at the heart of our mission in America today. It's for this reason that we're gathered here for this conference. The theme of the meeting, as you know, is, "The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Christian Life." These words are important. They flow directly from two key Vatican II documents: the Constitution on the Liturgy and the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. So I'd like to touch briefly upon a few of the liturgical truths these documents have brought to the fore over the past 30 years.

Goal of Vatican II
Vatican II set out to make Christians enthusiastic again about living their faith and bringing it to the whole world. (See SC 1). That's why the Council Fathers undertook the reform and promotion of the liturgy. They understood that the goal of all apostolic work is to bring women and men together in the Church to praise God: "to take part in the Sacrifice and to eat the Lord's Supper." They also taught that, through the liturgy, God's grace was poured out on us "as from a fountain," so that all the activity of the Church could be accomplished with great fruitfulness. But for the liturgy to be effective, the faithful need to worship with the right heart. This was the greatest pastoral challenge and the reason for all the conciliar reforms of external practice: to help the faithful lift up their hearts. Often in Church history, we've been guilty of overemphasizing the liturgical externals. My duty -- and the duty of all those who have pastoral responsibility regarding the liturgy -- were spelled out by the Council Fathers, "to ensure that the faithful take part [in the liturgy] fully aware of what they are doing, actively engaged in the rite and enriched by it."

Matters of the heart
Awareness, engagement and enrichment are matters of the heart. Dealing with the human heart is a sensitive thing, and a great responsibility. So often the heart is weighed down by sorrow, doubt or anxiety. This is why, at the preface fo the Eucharistic Canon, the celebrant calls the assembly to "Lift up your hearts." When the assembly responds, "We lift them up to the Lord," the people of God remind themselves that in the face of the darkness which sometimes surrounds them, Christ has won the victory of good over evil. This involves a great act of faith and love. Mere sentiment falls short of meeting the heart's deeper needs. A person's deepest longings can only be met by possessing the truth in love.

The Desert Fathers said that the battle for the heart is waged in the mind. And this reminds us of the need to provide for a more thorough catechesis on the liturgy. For the hearts and minds of our people to be aware of, engaged in, and enriched by, the Eucharist -- this is the goal of our conversations this weekend.

The Second Vatican Council called for a full, conscious and active participation of all Catholics in the liturgy. This is a key to celebrating the coming Holy Year.

So what does it mean to "participate" in the Liturgy -- not just for priests, deacons and other ministers, but also for the whole assembly? Today, too many Catholics assume that taking part in the liturgy almost requires us to be involved in a liturgical ministry of one kind or another. Some of us presume that if we're not involved in a formal ministry, we're more of a spectator than a participant. Others are frustrated because they see in all the rubrics and norms which guide participation, a lack of spontaneity, and therefore a lack of authenticity. Some even change or ignore uncomfortable parts of a ritual in the name of improved participation.

The liturgy is the Church at prayer: a prayer offered through Christ to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. But what's the purpose of the liturgy, and why should we join in the worship? Do we do it for God or for ourselves, the people of God? The answer depends on your perspective.

Moment of communion
From God's side, the Eucharistic liturgy is a moment of communion and mission with and for His people. The liturgy becomes a grace-filled place and time where He can give himself -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- to His people so that they can possess and enjoy Him. In this possession and enjoyment, He empowers them and then sends them out to bring His love to every corner of the world until the end of time.

From the human point of view, the liturgy is worship which we offer God. This may seem a bit presumptuous. God doesn't need us to tell Him He's God. Nonetheless, we do believe that contingent, limited and selfish creatures like ourselves are empowered to offer God something of eternal value. We're able to do so because of our participation in Christ's work of redemption, which not only saves us from sin but raises us to divine life. Through the liturgy, we become deified instruments of praise: revealing, magnifying and extending God's glory and the greatness of His almighty love.

Therefore, the reason for the liturgy is the praise of God and the sanctification of the human person. Again, God doesn't "need" our praise, but as Augustine teaches in the Confessions, He created us to find our happiness in praising Him. This praise is an intimately personal work for each one of us -- but it is not private. There's a crucial difference here. "Personal" and "private" do not mean the same thing. Catholics are not rugged individualists when it comes to faith. We worship together, in relationship to others, through the Church. This means we're called to participate in the liturgy together, genuinely united in our hearts and minds.

Holy relationships
Similarly, our sanctification is not a "private" thing. God sanctifies us together, in the Church, so that all our relationships become holy. And what's the nature of this holiness? For Christians, holiness consists of charity -- a friendship-love of God. That same love which is exchanged among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is given to us, to make us holy. The more God sanctifies us, the more we feel the simultaneous need to be in union with Him, and in right relationship with all those He has created along with us. To participate fully in the liturgy means to submit our whole human experience to God -- in worship together with the people of God -- in a manner which takes up our full intelligence, our full freedom and our whole heart.

We should remember that the entire assembly is called to take part in the Eucharist. To ensure this participation, the Holy Spirit created different ministries in the Church. These ministries all serve the royal priesthood which all of us share -- lay, religious and ordained. Each of us receives the royal priesthood at baptism, and we have it strengthened at confirmation. Through this royal priesthood, the baptized are joined to the prayers of Jesus in the heavenly liturgy, so that their prayers are united to His before the Father. Through the prayer and adoration of the royal priesthood, the Church cooperates in Christ's work of redemption and brings it to bear on the real life situations of God's people today. Accordingly, in 1 Peter we read that "you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of His own, so that you may announce the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light."(2:9).

The royal priesthood is served in a uniquely important way by the ministerial priesthood, the priesthood bestowed on those of us who receive the sacrament of orders as priests and bishops. The roles of the royal priesthood and the ministerial priesthood are fully equal in dignity but complementary in nature -- in other words, they're distinct by God's design, and never purely functional or interchangeable. The better we understand this truth, the more it will help us foster the active participation in the liturgy called for by Vatican II.

The ordained priest, through the sacrament of orders, is configured permanently to Christ. This empowers him to act in the person of "Christ the head." And this further enables him to lead the assembly, the body of Christ, into a sacred banquet, a feast of sacrificial love. He does this not by an arbitrary imposition of his own will, but through following a plan revealed by the Holy Spirit to the Church. This plan is called a ritual, and a celebrant knows how to follow it, because of the norms and rubrics it contains. This plan can, of course, be culturally adapted by local bishops, who must also ensure that the integrity of the plan is never compromised. But the purpose of the ritual is to protect the unity of worship of the whole Church, through every culture, in every part of the world.

Ritual leads the celebrant, other ministers and the assembly to freely perform their complementary roles with wisdom, trust and excellence. As Catholics, we believe the rituals we celebrate in our liturgies are the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church. This is why we have confidence when lifting up our hearts to God in the manner prescribed by the Church. Sacred ritual helps humanity grow accustomed to divine things -- and it teaches each person how to join his or her heart and mind with those of others. This is the goal of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal: It provides the norms which govern how we celebrate the Eucharist, and in doing so, it leads us toward God's presence.

Of course, our worship of God requires much more than just following ritual. Full participation in the liturgy means that the whole assembly needs to take the joys, sorrows and anxieties of daily life, and join them to the prayer of Jesus Christ before the Father. Plenty of things get in the way. More often than not, the obstacles to worship lie deep in our own hearts. Anything which weighs down our hearts can prevent us from raising them up. Only repentance, on-going conversion, prayer, fellowship and catechesis can overcome the barriers to our participation in the liturgy.

The secret to participating fully in our worship has less to do with external changes than it does with interior transformation. A grace-filled opportunity for this interior conversion is being offered to us in a special way this year, as we prepare for the Great Jubilee. This is why I've asked Capuchin Friars to visit every part of the diocese throughout 1999: to make confession more easily available to our people at this unique time of renewal. As I wrote in my pastoral letter of last December, a personal return to penance and reconciliation is the vital first step to recovering the riches of Christ offered to us in the Eucharist. Ritual, rubrics and pious practices take their proper place when lived by a contrite people. People who have forgiving and forgiven hearts know that the struggle to lay down their lives for one another lies at the core of the Christian life -- and they find in their rituals the freedom to worship in love.

Worshiping in love requires that we contemplate Jesus' presence when we celebrate the Eucharist. To contemplate Christ means to behold Him with the eyes of faith. This is critically important today, because so many of those who leave the Church do so because they've been discouraged and do not see Christ. The disciples on the road to Emmaus knew the same discouragement. When Jesus came to them, they didn't even recognize Him. He questioned them about their discouragement, and instead of recognizing Him, they spoke of defeat and death. And so, very gently, He admonished them, explaining to them the Scriptures. Still, they didn't recognize Him -- but they did invite Him to share a meal. And with that invitation, He transformed their table into a Eucharist, and they recognized Him in the breaking of the bread. In this recognition -- this contemplation of Christ and this intimately personal experience of His love -- they immediately went forth to proclaim the good news.

In like manner, Catholics can only be delivered from the spiritual discouragement which prevents us from proclaiming the good news with our lives, if we can behold Jesus Christ in the liturgy. Here, good catechesis leading to a deeper encounter with the person of Christ becomes essential. The reason is simple. Beholding Christ leads to participating in His great mystery of sacrificial love. In the liturgy, Jesus is present as our head in the priest, gathering us together, and uniting our hearts and our gifts with his. Christ's body is present in the entire assembly gathered in prayer, revealing the unity of love Christ has with the Father through the assembly's loving unity in words and actions. Jesus the eternal Word is present when the Scriptures are proclaimed and the demands of the Covenant are preached. But in a real, special and very powerful manner, He is also present in the Eucharist as the perfect sacrifice, the medicine of immortality and the antidote for death.

After the priest says the words of institution, our gifts of bread and wine truly become Jesus' body and blood, soul and divinity. In the Eucharistic Prayer, Christ present on the altar offers Himself to our Father in heaven, so that the work of redemption accomplished at Calvary will bear fruit in our lives today. Through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our prayers and the prayers of the entire assembly united together, are made fruitful, so that they have a real effect in the world we inhabit. At the same time, the Father truly delights in our praise. So at Mass, heaven and earth literally touch. Our praise, because it's been purified and united to Christ, is pleasing to God, and it anticipates the praise and glory of heaven.

In the Eucharist, this gift of Christ's presence is given to us not only so we can offer Him back to the Father. It's also provided to us as real food -- spiritual nourishment which sustains us in our pilgrimage here on earth. The communion rite is a beautiful moment in the Eucharistic liturgy. The sacred character of this moment is revealed best by the prayer we offer together just before we approach the altar: "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed." This phrase echoes the words of the centurion who petitioned Christ for the healing of his servant. Jesus marveled at this extraordinary expression of faith, which allowed Him to reveal "the immeasurable riches of His grace." The Church asks us to have exactly the same reverent faith whenever we receive our Lord's body and blood. Today the faithful come to communion far more frequently than in the past -- which is a very good thing. But I sometimes wonder if we really understand the reverence and interior preparation which receiving the Eucharist calls for. Again, this is why a regular, personal devotion to the sacrament of penance always leads to a deeper experience of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist in Colorado
Coloradans have a rich history of love for the Eucharist. Robert Kreutz, one of our own artists, composed Gift of Finest Wheat which was the theme song of a national Eucharistic Congress, and is still used today. The song beautifully celebrates the truth that Jesus Christ, present in the Eucharist, satisfies the hunger of our hearts, pours out His blood for us, and makes us one. The Eucharist also anchors the formation of our future deacons, priests and lay ministers at Our Lady of the New Advent Theological Institute, which we inaugurated last week. In recent years, many more of our faithful have taken up daily Mass and spend hours in prayer adoring the Blessed Sacrament, especially when it is solemnly exposed. And youth movements like Youth 2000 and the Life Teen program have fostered an awareness of the power of the Eucharist in the lives of many of our young people.

There's more. Many new movements which promise to deepen our understanding of the liturgy have also made their home in northern Colorado, and we're very grateful for the gift of their witness. The Neo-Catechumenal Way, the Christian Life Movement, Communion and Liberation, and the newest arrival to northern Colorado, the Community of the Beatitudes -- these are all wonderful expressions of apostolic zeal. And of course we're also graced by many beautiful local apostolates centered specifically on the Eucharist. In fact, many of our people minister the Blessed Sacrament to the sick and the shut-ins of our community. And as parishes plan renovations to support our growing Church, vigorous discussion about the art and environment of worship is common. Pastoral concerns about the liturgy are always at the heart of these discussions. These are all healthy signs for our Church. But many challenges and opportunities exist which we still need to engage.

The Eucharist and our culture
John Paul II urges us to make the Eucharist the center of our celebrations for the Great Jubilee. He says that, "The year 2000 will be intensely eucharistic: In the sacrament of the Eucharist the savior, who took flesh in Mary's womb 20 centuries ago, continues to offer Himself to humanity as the source of divine life."

It's in this context that the Holy Father says, "Everyone is asked to do as much as possible to ensure that the great challenge of the year 2000 is not overlooked, for this challenge involves a special grace of the Lord for the church and for the whole of humanity."

Our mission today is the same as it has always been: to bring Jesus Christ to those who need Him the most. This mission includes building a whole civilization of love -- which has, at its center, a culture of life and a respect for human dignity and rights. Part of that task is to engage our secular contemporaries in a morally compelling way. In the western United States, the rugged individualism embedded in our pioneer spirit needs to be carefully re-evaluated. We also need to recognize that a great many people in our society are already secretly weary of consumerism. They know, in their hearts, that they won't -- and can't -- find the meaning of life in acquiring more things. It's useful here to remember the words of Augustine, speaking about Fifth Century Rome. They could just as easily be addressed to our lives today:

"The only joy which they attained had the fragile brilliance of crystal, a joy far outweighed by the fear that it would be shattered in an instant."

Fear, loneliness and isolation threaten the modern heart because deep down, people are hungry for a more authentic experience of life. They yearn for the truth about our purpose in the world. They long for the deeper life which Jesus in the Eucharist makes possible.

The sharpest challenge to our faith is more subtle than our culture with its obvious problems. The deeper issue involves our own lack of zeal; our own discouragement and doubt. Why aren't we more vigorous in preaching and teaching the faith? It's because the task of taking up the Cross of Christ can be arduous and embarrassing. We can evade the mission God gives us, and we often do. We can distract ourselves with toys, career, travel and entertainment. In the process, though, we become spectators. We learn to watch life rather than live it.

Spectators don't contribute. They merely consume. And too often in recent decades, we've carried this consumerist attitude into liturgy. Instead of losing ourselves in worship of the Trinity and love for one another, we're preoccupied by what we are or aren't "getting out" of the Mass. We expect and even train musicians and other ministers to entertain us, rather than to lead us in prayer. In the process, we've too often lost our sense of awe, our reverence for Jesus in the Eucharist, and our Christ-centered service to one another. In our spiritual sleep, important moments of grace are passing us by, while the young, lonely and poor of our world suffer a new crucifixion, alone and without our support. The words of the great Eastern Father, John Chrysostom, speak to us very powerfully today, just as they did 1,500 years ago:

You have tasted the Blood of the Lord, yet you do not recognize your brother . . . You dishonor this table when you do not judge worthy of sharing your food, someone judged worthy to take part in this meal . . . God freed you from all your sins and invited you here, but you have not become merciful (CCC 1397).

The Eucharist is not just a symbol. Or a memory. Or a pious ritual. Christ is real and present. The living, tangible, flesh-and-blood presence of Jesus in the Eucharist commits us to the poor and wounded of our world. Their hunger and thirst must become our hunger and thirst. Only a whole civilization of love can provide for these kinds of needs. And the engine by which such a civilization can be built is the liturgy, which is the source and summit of God's friendship-love for us. You see, only the love that comes from God and goes to God, is powerful enough to heal the wounds of our brothers and sisters -- in this and every age.

If we truly believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and we act on it, then others will clearly see and want the joy which is ours. If we enter more deeply into the solidarity of love which the Holy Spirit offers us in the liturgy, then God will use us to convert the world.

Conclusion
The Holy Year, beginning on Christmas Eve this year and continuing through January 6, 2000, is almost upon us Since the Eucharist is at the heart of the Great Jubilee, it's fitting that we're turning our attention to this great gift.

In our gathering this weekend, we'll be listening to and dialoguing with experts in liturgy from across the country and around the world. They'll reflect on the complementary roles of the clergy and laity in making the Eucharist the heart of the "new evangelization" of America in the new millennium. They'll also discuss with us how to better prepare for the Eucharist and other liturgies in our parish families. I hope we can gain from this a deeper appreciation for the Eucharist, through a renewed awareness of the new Lectionary, the role of liturgy committees, prayer groups, scripture studies, and endeavors geared to evangelization and catechesis. All are part of continuing the renewal begun by the Holy Spirit at Vatican II.

I began by saying I would turn my comments to you specifically at the end, as laypeople and religious who make up our wider family of faith. So much of the practical work of the Church is done by you. I could easily thank you, and speak about the life we share together in faith, for hours. But tonight I would just ask you to join me in working to recover the right focus and proper reverence in our worship. Liturgy is not a show, or a performance, or a kind of entertainment. Liturgy is about God. It should focus our worship and our hearts where they belong -- on Him. Not on us. We're important because Jesus died for us. But we're secondary in the act of worship. And so our musicians, our liturgists, acolytes, lectors and ministers of Holy Communion - all of the wonderful people who serve in these apostolates - need to become transparent, humble and deeply faithful to the liturgy which the Church defines . . . so that nothing distracts from our encounter with God.

An English Russian Orthodox bishop, Anthony Bloom, once used an image which all of us should take to heart. He said the best surgeon's gloves are those which are so transparent and flexible that they're neither seen nor felt. And if so, then the surgeon can work marvelous things through them. But if the gloves are opaque or soiled or rigid, they get in the way. They hinder the surgeon rather than help. So too with our worship, our pastoral service and our daily lives. The more unselfish, transparent and serving we are, the greater the work Jesus will do through us. In the liturgy and in our lives of service, we need to become less so that Jesus will become more; we need to become invisible so that God will be ever more visible.

Thank you.