Cardinal Cupich discusses synod, Eucharist during congress panel

Cardinal Cupich participated in a panel discussion titled “A Synodal Church on Mission: Eucharist as the Source and Summit of Evangelization” on July 18 during the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.

Cardinal Cupich is a voting delegate to the Synod on Synodality and has spoken and written extensively about the process. He was joined by Bishop Daniel Flores, the U.S. member of the preparatory committee for the assembly of the world Synod of Bishops, and José Manuel de Urquidi, a lay delegate to the synod.

Cardinal Cupich offered opening remarks on the theme and expanded further before participants broke into groups for discussion.

The cardinal began by explaining that synodality is a journey.

“First, it means that at the heart of our Christian life and the life of the church is the need for ongoing conversion and its promise is freedom,” he said. “So, instead of thinking of ourselves as being Christian, the emphasis needs to shift to continually and gradually becoming more fully Christian, becoming freer to be the person God has made us to be. The second thing this implies is a recognition that God is active, leading us, preparing a future for us that is not yet fully known.”

Understanding what Christ’s resurrection truly means is why Pope Francis is asking the church to distinguish the voice of the Spirit from the voices of the world, the cardinal said.

“Now it is at the Eucharist, which the Second Vatican Council defined as the source and summit of the Christian life, when we continue the journey and grow in becoming more fully Christian, which we began at our baptism,” Cardinal Cupich said. “Let’s remember that the Eucharist is one of three sacraments of initiation: baptism, confirmation and Eucharist. Yet, the Eucharist is the only repeatable sacrament of initiation. So that whenever we celebrate the Eucharist we gradually more fully participate in the dying and rising of Christ, gradually become Christians, gradually become freer to take up the mission of Christ, which is our baptismal calling. In other words, the Eucharist is the school for becoming a synodal church, something that should be kept in mind in this moment of Eucharistic revival.”

Vatican II made it clear that Christ is always at work in the church and “if there is a crisis of faith in the church today, it is not so much that people do not believe that Jesus is present in the Eucharist, but it is that people do not fully understand and believe what it means for Jesus to have risen from the dead,” the cardinal explained.

Therefore, the focus of the Mass should be on what Christ is doing to those who receive him and who are transformed to carry out his mission in the world, he said.

“The most recent English translation of the Roman Missal expresses this well at the time the gifts are offered. Just after the procession of bread and wine and our offerings, the presider invites the assembly in these words: ‘Pray brothers and sisters that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God our Father.’ The community responds: ‘May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all the Church.’ This makes clear that each person and the community as a whole receive and accept an invitation to share in the sacrifice of Christ made at Calvary, or as Trent tells us, Christ makes present in the Eucharist ‘his victory and triumph over death,’” he said. “We complete that act of participation as we process together as a community to receive the Eucharist, to eat and drink, so that we may become what we consume, thereby becoming more fully a synodal church, a church that walks together into the world to take up Christ’s mission. Synodality is the mode, the way of being church, journeying together into the world, giving witness to Christ’s victory and triumph over death.”

Cardinal Cupich also explained how the Synod on Synodality is different from all the previous synods the church has held by inviting laypeople, men and women religious, and priests and deacons to be voting members. Also, the process is about listening to each other and where the Holy Spirit is moving in people’s lives, he said.

“It is not a matter of figuring things out, coming up with new ideas or strategies, which is often the default approach that Americans take when facing challenges,” the cardinal said. “Rather, the aim is to discover the truth that the Spirit reveals, and this requires attentiveness. Conversation in the Spirit yields real fruit in a process of discovering what already is given by God. This is why the Holy Father has repeatedly insisted that the synod is not a parliament, where arguments are made, and compromises are sought in a dialectic exchange. So, seeking truth in the synodal process comes in the kind of conversation that asks what is in the heart of another, what troubles and worries the other. This is how God converses with us, as we see in the first conversation God had in the Book of Genesis.”