"Sweet anointing, cleansing love, merciful healer, unending love."
Tony Meléndez sang to his guitar, telling the audience gathered at Lucas Oil Stadium July 19 for the National Eucharistic Congress' Encounter session that Jesus can heal them. And he was living proof.
The 62-year-old guitarist, who was born without arms and with a clubbed foot, talked about his life and how God used for his glory the differences that had caused his mother to cry for her baby after his birth. The seven surgeries that were required to correct his foot physically optimized his ability to play the guitar with his feet, he said. Meléndez showed a video of playing in 1987 for Pope St. John Paul II, who kissed him and told him to share his gift with the world. He has since played in 45 countries.
The third day of the national congress, held July 17-21 in Indianapolis, had as its theme "Into Gethsemane" -- and it saw wide encouragement for congress-goers to experience healing in the Eucharist and then to bring Jesus' healing to others.
"Healed people heal people," said Mary Healy, a Scripture professor at Detroit's Sacred Heart Major Seminary. She spoke about Jesus' healings in Scripture and shared powerful examples of people living today who have been healed of serious medical conditions through prayer.
What Jesus did 2,000 years ago "he is still doing now, today, and he wants us to know it, and he wants us to experience it," she said, adding, "the Lord wants his church to be healed people, set free, made whole, so that we can go out and be his instruments of healing."
The Cultivate impact session for families focused on healing through the sacraments.
"Healing is an ongoing encounter with God's love that brings us into wholeness and communion," said Bob Schuchts, author and founder of the Tallahassee, Florida-based John Paul II Healing Center.
"Every time we receive Jesus in the Eucharist, we can say, 'Jesus, heal this part of me that's dead inside; this part that's grieving; heal this relationship I have,' and he answers those prayers," Schuchts said. "If he's really truly present, is there anything he can't do now that he did back then?"
Before a crowd of about 5,000, Mari Pablo of Evangelical Catholic reflected on the difficulties of living out the faith and helping others to do so in ministry at the Renewal impact session.
"Being Catholic doesn't mean that you don't suffer or have struggles," she said. "We're the religion that has crucifixes everywhere. But the story doesn't end there. He conquered death and the grave. I know suffering, pain, death and healing are hard. But we're created for so much more. We're created for heaven."
At the Awake youth impact session, more than 1,000 teenagers raised their voices in song to God and heard a message of healing for their hearts. Catholic motivational speaker Jackie Francois Angel told the youth that God "loves us so deeply, but unfortunately so many of us don't know how good we are. So many of us don't think we're good enough."
"God's love is unconditional. He proved his love for us. And while we are all sinners, Christ died for us. He doesn't stop loving us when we do bad things. He loves us in spite of that," Angel said. "He loves all of us because he created us. We don't earn God's love, which also means we can't lose God's love. God's love is unconditional."
The clergy Abide impact session continued with a focus on forming men and women as Eucharistic missionaries and laying the groundwork for them to bear fruit as evangelizers in an increasingly secularized culture. Pastors were encouraged to build a culture in their parishes and dioceses in which the families in their flocks can be formed and equipped to live and share the Gospel in a new "apostolic age."
Nearly 2,000 Latino Catholics joined the morning Mass in Spanish attended by Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez, and then heard the Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio preach on how the Eucharist, as Christ's medicine, heals "our inability to love," gives hope, and "through our full, conscious and active participation in the Eucharistic celebration" transforms people in God's love, empowering them to "practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy" by which the Lord will judge his followers.
Thousands of Catholics gathered in Lucas Oil Stadium at the early morning Mass in English heard Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory of Washington reflect on St. John's words: "God is light and in him there is no darkness at all."
He noted that it is often "the uncomplicated faith of ordinary people that serves as an assurance of the wonder of this gift" of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist. He said this belief "must also prompt our equally important active response to that presence in charity, in each of our lives offered in service and with care for others."
Congress-goers that day had an opportunity to put this into practice by joining in packing several hundred thousand meals that afternoon for Indianapolis' people suffering from hunger and homelessness, a number of whom could be seen in the area sleeping under highways or asking for help to get a meal.
The day saw a powerful testimony to the power of belief in the Real Presence and radical commitment to the Gospel at the Empower session from Martha Hennessy, the granddaughter of Servant of God Dorothy Day.
Hennessy, who remains active in the Catholic Worker movement at the Maryhouse Catholic Worker community in New York City, said that her grandmother was devoted to the Eucharist and she would remain silent for 20 minutes after holy Communion "to allow herself to absorb the presence of God within her before returning to her work."
She shared comments from Day about her devotion to the Eucharist, such as this one: "Scripture, on the one hand, and the Eucharist, the Word made flesh, on the other, have in them that strength which no power on Earth can withstand." Day also called the Mass "our food, drink, our delight, our refreshment, our courage, our life."
At lunchtime, the expo hall in the Indiana Convention Center was packed as people sang, danced and clapped along to a performance of the Dominican friar band The Hillbilly Thomists.
Philip and Melissa Smaldino, from Yorktown, Indiana, who are expecting their seventh child in October, watched the band from the sidelines along with their six little ones. The couple, which said they came back to Christ in the Catholic Church 10 years ago, said they especially enjoyed the periods of Eucharistic adoration, both at Lucas Oil Stadium in the evenings and also the "absolutely packed" family Holy Hour at St. John the Evangelist Church, where the children got to bring Christ flowers.
"Our hope is we grow in our faith and devotion to Christ and the Eucharist through it all," he said.
At the midmorning press conference at the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel, Archbishop Pérez remarked on the excitement all around him.
"I've been a priest 35 years, 12 years a bishop. And other than a papal visit ... I don't remember an event like this," Archbishop Pérez said.
"You can sense the energy of what's happening here, which is touching hearts," he said.
The afternoon's 20 breakout sessions and special events sought to empower Catholics with knowledge and tools to live out their faith.
Deacon Charlie Echeverry, a Catholic speaker, podcaster and entrepreneur in Los Angeles, told people in his session that 42% of U.S. Catholics are Latino -- and successfully engaging them will "actually achieve that great goal of bringing the Catholic Church to every corner in this country."
Using statistics on the rates of decline in baptisms and marriages, he made a compelling case on the need for the U.S. church to better recognize and activate the potential of Latino Catholics, and stem the exodus of young Latinos, who are the No. 1 group leaving the church.
"We have to start reflecting and ask ourselves: are we ministering to the sheep in the way that we should?" he said.
To activate this "sleeping giant" of the church, he encouraged Catholics who are not Latino to get to know the Latino Catholics in their parish, be inclusive and work to involve them to meet their specific needs and leverage their specific gifts. He called for support for inculturated ministries for youth and young adult Latinos that may not be in Spanish, but "speak Latino," such as the Corazón Puro ministry in New York. He explained that most Latinos prefer to attend Mass in Spanish, even if they don't fluently speak the language, due to cultural connections.
Hosffman Ospino, a professor of theology and religious education at Boston College who researches Hispanic ministry, also talked about "the Eucharist as a source of communion in a culturally diverse church" during a Spanish-language breakout session.
"We need to be open to the possibilities that there are many ways to celebrate, contemplate and live the Eucharist," he explained to a room filled by Latino Catholics from different backgrounds and heritages. Rather than tension, he said, witnessing how people "express their faith and love for the Eucharist" in different ways can prompt people today.
"That is not my experience, but it is my church … because we are only one church, we are part of the same community," he said.
Emily Wilson Hussem, a speaker, YouTuber, author, wife and mom, guided hundreds of women in a mini-retreat experience, reflecting on the areas of life where it is most difficult to imitate Mary's courageous "yes" to God.
She led them in an exercise of sharing stories in small groups about times in their lives when it was difficult to say "yes" to God and moments where beauty had come out of suffering. She shared her own experience as a child of being inspired by the beauty of seeing her church community support and cook for her family in the suffering of her mother's battle with breast cancer.
She encouraged the women to pray for even just five minutes before the Lord about their suffering and ask "draw me closer to you here" and "make something beautiful come of this." Amid people's suffering, she asked, "Where do we go, where do we find ourselves? At the Eucharistic table or somewhere else? The Lord is always inviting us there to be with him."
Throughout the day, pilgrims filled the exhibit hall. Kids played with giant towers of blocks and to throw cornhole bags while long lines continued for the Shroud of Turin exhibit and for confessions.
While pilgrims waited in line to see the Shroud of Turin exhibit, Father Carl Zoucha from South Sioux City, Nebraska, explained the mysteries of the rosary before beginning to pray.
A group of Dominican Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary of the Philippines, waiting a little farther back in the same line, shared how moved they had been by Eucharistic adoration with 50,000 people at Lucas Oil Stadium during the evening revivals.
Sister Lergie Tabasa, who came from Hawaii, reflected on the experience of God's presence at the congress.
"I know it is not a coincidence that we are here," she told OSV News. "You know each one of us was touched by God to be here, to share our faith, and to join with one another in all walks of life."
Contributing to this story were Lauretta Brown, Gretchen R. Crowe, Maria-Pia Negro Chin, Sean Gallagher, Natalie Hoefer, Michael Heinlein, John Shaughnessy, Peter Jesserer Smith and Maria Wiering.
