Jesus Christ may have been the main protagonist at the National Eucharistic Congress, but the golden, unusually large monstrance used to carry him each night before thousands at Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium caught people’s attention, too.   

Where did they get such a big, beautiful monstrance from? And as one reporter jokingly asked, had Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, lead organizer of the Congress, been lifting weights to be able to carry it through the stadium?

The monstrance, Cozzens told journalists at the Congress, was actually the same model that organizers had seen images of Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez use in a Eucharistic procession through the streets of San Gabriel in March 2023. 

LA Catholics participated in a 6-mile walk with Archbishop José H. Gomez and the Blessed Sacrament from Mission San Gabriel Arcángel to St. Luke the Evangelist Church in Temple City, then back to the mission. (Victor Alemán)

Almost immediately after the event, Congress organizers in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops asked Archbishop Gomez’s office, where can we get one of those? 

The inquiry led them to Father Miguel Angel Ruiz, a 31-year-old LA priest ordained in 2019 with roots in Guadalajara, Mexico. Ruiz was known for having the same monstrance, and often lending it to other priests in the LA Archdiocese for special events. It was his monstrance, in fact, that the late Bishop David O’Connell borrowed when he famously blessed Los Angeles in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. 

Ruiz told the officials that the monstrance was made by a liturgical store in Guadalajara, Articulos Religiosos San Jose. They ordered an exact replica of the monstrance — one of the store’s most popular ones — in a hurry, since Pope Francis had agreed to bless it in a private audience in Rome a few weeks later. 

Four-feet tall and weighing more than 20 pounds, the new monstrance — together with hosts specially sized for it  — was shipped from Guadalajara to Tijuana, where Ruiz drove to pick it up. From across the border in San Diego, he had it shipped to USCCB headquarters in Washington, D.C., just in time for the Congress delegation led by Bishop Cozzens to bring it to Rome for the pope’s blessing. 

Pope Francis blesses a four-foot-tall monstrance, a chalice and a paten during an audience with members of the organizing committees of the U.S. National Eucharistic Congress and Eucharistic Revival in the library of the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican June 19, 2023. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

“It’s big. It’s beautiful,” the pope said with a smile to members of the Congress planning team at the June 19, 2023 meeting.

Ruiz, now administrator at Our Lady of the Rosary of Talpa Church in East LA, told Angelus that his personal connection with the monstrance actually began at a convent in Guadalajara he used to visit as a seminarian.

While praying before the Blessed Sacrament in the convent’s adoration room, “I would think to myself, ‘When I become a priest, I want one like that one,’ ” he recalled. 

A few years later, the sisters at the convent purchased the monstrance as a gift for Ruiz’s ordination to the priesthood. The rest, as Ruiz says, “is history.”