June 20, 2025 // National

For National Eucharistic Revival, the End is the Beginning

Maria Wiering

(OSV News) – The National Eucharistic Revival formally ended on Sunday, June 22, the feast of Corpus Christi. But the three-year initiative, which included last year’s 10th National Eucharistic Congress and the 2024 and 2025 National Eucharistic Pilgrimages, laid the groundwork for more efforts to come, its leaders said.

“The beauty of the revival is that the whole Church in the United States focused on the Eucharist for a few years, and I do believe that had a powerful impact,” said Bishop Andrew H. Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, who led much of the revival’s efforts on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Leaders expect National Eucharistic Congress Inc., a nonprofit organization in a partnership with the USCCB, to continue to build on the revival’s work through annual National Eucharistic Pilgrimages as well as diocesan, regional, and national Eucharistic congresses. Organizers hope to hold the next National Eucharistic Congress in 2029, a proposal on which the U.S. bishops are expected to vote when they meet in November.

Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, first proposed the idea of a National Eucharistic Revival to the USCCB after the Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that only one-third of Catholics believed the Church’s teaching that the consecrated bread and wine were truly Jesus’ body and blood. At the time, Bishop Barron was chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis.

In November of 2021, the bishops voted overwhelmingly in favor of the 2022-25 revival initiative, including a National Eucharistic Congress, making it an effort of its Secretariat of Evangelization and Catechesis. At the same meeting, they approved a new document on the Eucharist underscoring its centrality to the Catholic faith.

By then, Bishop Cozzens had succeeded Bishop Barron as the chairman of the Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis.

“The Scripture verse that has kept coming to me over and over is from St. Paul: ‘The power now at work in you is able to do immeasurably more than you asked or imagined.’ And that’s been my experience of the Eucharistic Revival,” Bishop Cozzens told OSV News, referring to Ephesians 3:20. “God did immeasurably more than I have asked or imagined,” Bishop Cozzens said. “I knew that the Holy Spirit was in the idea, but I didn’t expect to see it take off in the way that it did, in terms of engagement across the country.”

The National Eucharistic Congress Inc. nonprofit formed in 2022 to support the bishops’ vision for the congress and accompanying National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, with several bishops on its board and Bishop Cozzens as its chairman.

The organization has been a key collaborator for the revival as a whole, and “they’re poised now to carry forward the work of Eucharistic renewal,” said David Spesia, executive director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Evangelization and Catechesis.

The revival’s guiding principle has been “that we would have a movement of Catholics who have been healed, converted, formed, and unified, and then sent on mission,” Spesia told OSV News. “Bishop Cozzens spent a couple of years saying, ‘We’re not starting a program, we’re starting a fire.’ … It’s not to say there isn’t a lot of work left to be done, but I think there’s awareness that … missionary discipleship rooted in a living relationship with Jesus in the Eucharist is what we all need, it’s what we all want, it’s what we’re all called to.”

“And,” he added, “we’re all sent on mission, and I think the mission awareness maybe is going to be the greatest long-term fruit of the revival.”

While Bishop Cozzens has been credited for his leadership of the revival, he thinks of himself more as its “cheerleader,” he told OSV News. “The bishops engaged it at every level, and that’s what made it really successful, and then also God’s mercy and goodness in His Holy Spirit working through it.”

In 2022, Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate revisited the topic of Catholics’ belief in the Real Presence with a more nuanced survey. It found almost two-thirds of Catholics believe in the Real Presence, but only 17 percent of Catholic adults attend Mass at least weekly.

“One simple goal we had was that every Catholic in the pew would know we were having a revival,” Bishop Cozzens said. “I think we pretty much got to that – like, if you’ve been going to Mass for the past three years, you heard about this revival. Even just that means the Church has been strengthened and that the Church is experiencing some type of renewal in her Eucharistic faith.

“Now, moving the numbers of the Catholics who don’t go to Mass or the Catholics who are minimally attached to Mass – that’s a generational work, which is why we want to see some of this work continue in a different way,” he added. “To move those numbers is going to take time, and that’s part of the whole movement of the Church in the United States from maintenance to mission. But we began, and we invited the whole Church to think about that powerfully through the Eucharist and revival.”