Bishop Olmsted explains why the Real Presence needs to be the foundation of faith for Catholics
From Brian Fraga with Our Sunday Visitor
St. John Vianney, the Cure of Ars, didn’t attain any scholastic honors, but his deep love of the Eucharist influenced countless others to encounter Christ’s Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament.
“In the very first paragraph, I tried to talk about the fact that the Eucharist is not something that’s beyond us. The simplest person can appreciate the Eucharist,” Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix said in a recent interview regarding his new apostolic exhortation, “Veneremur Cernui — Down in Adoration Falling.”
Bishop Olmsted told Our Sunday Visitor that he wrote his third apostolic exhortation — released on Holy Thursday, when Christ instituted the Eucharist — to remind the faithful that the “greatest anchor” Christians have in the midst of modern turmoil is “Christ himself, found in the holy Eucharist.”
“The second sentence of the Catechism — Chapter 1, Verse 1 — says ‘every time in every place the Lord draws near to each person,’” Bishop Olmsted said. “He does, and he’s doing that through COVID. He’s doing that in the present time. And how does he become more present to us than in the Eucharist?”
Our Sunday Visitor: Why did you decide to write this exhortation on the Eucharist now?
