Eucharistic revival is not something our bishops know about

Today I watched a little bit of the video of “REC2024” — the “Eucharistic liturgy” offered by Cardinal McElroy at the Religious Education Conference in LA in February. I’m late, but truly, even now, I don’t know if I’m up to the tungsten-carbide levels required properly to drill through this situation in its conception, execution, imagery, and aural effects.

The combination of extreme boredom and high anxiety produced by the proceedings might be beyond me to recover from, let alone analyze. I find myself not being able to breathe from the very first moments appearing on the screen — that purple glow! that ersatz concert-cum-megachurch vibe! that announcer, waylaid from a sports arena in which a particularly laconic contest had paused for halftime! — and by the time I fast forward to the writhings at (but not confined to) minute 9 or the cartoonishly giant Host (sorry, Lord!) at the consecration, I can’t subject myself to it all any longer.

I am quite sure I can’t find the right words to express the horror of three thousand years of monotheism flowering into nearly two thousand years of transcendent worship plunging to the bogs of this narcissistic and frankly, pagan display—

— or how it is also, simultaneously and risibly, banal; not at all the way we thought the abandonment of all that is Eucharistic, of everything that comprises the sacrifice of praise, other than the bare fact of it, would look.

I can’t do it, not today. (I do think the visuals, and music, speak for themselves, so perhaps I’m off the hook.)

About 18 months ago I confessed my cynical attitude about the proposed Eucharistic revival. I gave two examples, chosen really at random, not of singular abuses but of perfectly normalized habits or practices that, being widely accepted, show that our bishops have not earned the trust necessary to carry it out.

I wasn’t wrong.