The Eucharistic Revival and Social Salvation

This session addressed the ongoing Eucharistic Revival in North America, leading to a spirited discussion of the actual or potential role of Eucharistic piety in relation to social salvation, and the particular presences and absences of Christ in the Eucharist proposed in the revival and other practices.Lucas Briola's paper, entitled "Deepening the Eucharistic Revival, Deepening Social Salvation: Eucharistic Processions in Rural Communities," lifted up rural Eucharistic processions as a particularly rich locus for reflection on social salvation that includes care for creation.Briola first outlined three reasons for careful attention to these practices: the location of rural communities at the margins and peripheries of the church, where Pope Francis has directed our attention; the materiality, and particularly agricultural materiality, of rural life; and the embodied social and public character of processions as a form of Eucharistic piety.Briola drew upon the work William T. Cavanaugh on Eucharistic processions as actions in which Christ goes out from the church and returns to the church, and upon the motto of the Catholic Rural Life Conference in the United States, "Christ to the Country, the Country to Christ," in order to outline how these processions bring Christ out to the country, and then bring that rural country into deeper relationship with Christ.For the former, Briola argued that processions reveal and display the "doxological potential of all creation," showing the potential of all created reality, especially material rural ecologies, to become Eucharistic.Briola then explored how attention to rural material reality helps unveil the alienating and technocratic relation that characterize our food supply chains, suggesting that rural Eucharistic processions provide one way of contributing to an idea of social salvation that includes all of material creation.In remarks entitled "The Eucharist, the Church, and Real Presence," Brian Flanagan investigated how the rhetoric, marketing materials, and proposed program of both the Indianapolis Eucharistic Revival and the associated National Eucharistic Pilgrimages constructed and revealed an understanding of the relationship between the fourfold Eucharistic presences of Christ taught by the Second Vatican Council, namely in the Eucharistic species, in the Word of God preached, in the presider, and in the assembly of the faithful.Rather than an initial assessment of the Eucharistic revival as only promoting the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species to the neglect of the other three presences, Flanagan's paper argued that the Revival instead more interestingly placed those presences in a hierarchy of relations to the Eucharistic species.If, as taught in Sacrosanctum Concilium, Christ is supremely present in the Eucharistic species, the imagery and rhetoric of the Eucharistic revival place the presence of Christ in the clergy next, followed by the presence of Christ in the gathered