It’s long overdue for the friends of the bridegroom — Jesus — to awaken the heart of the Church, which is his Bride, Fr. John Burns said Thursday, July 18, at the second day of the National Eucharistic Congress.
“In a thousand ways, the Church today does not look the way that she is supposed to, and in turn, she does not love the way that she could — which ultimately is why people come along, take a look and say, ‘No thanks,’ and walk away,” the Archdiocese of Milwaukee priest told thousands of people to applause in a break-out session in Indianapolis.
“We’ve got work to do, and it is the beautiful work of awakening the heart of the Bride to her own beauty and the sacredness of her calling,” Fr. Burns said as the very first speaker in the “Empower” track of morning sessions at the congress.
“God desires a radiant Bride, and he wants us to bring all the world into this sacred, amorous bond that we call a new covenant.”
Fr. Burns stressed that if the Church doesn’t start attracting disciples with the nuptial theme of end times of creation that conclude the book of Revelation instead of evangelization, we end up off track.
“We end up building a big bulky, budget-laden, lumbering behemoth bureaucracy and that is no Bride,” he said to applause. Instead, God established the Church to give us a place to abide in his love.
“That has to sit at the center of our evangelization — it must.”
We’ve got it backward when it comes to drawing people to the Church, said Fr. Burns, who is one of 50 National Eucharistic Preachers.
Some also clapped with approval at that idea — even though he used some pretty big words to explain why.
“I’m asking you to hold this into every single conversation that you have about what we ought to do as a Church — that eschatology has to inform ecclesiology which has to inform evangelization.”
Eschatology is the study of the last things, and the last chapters of the last book of the Bible, Revelation, tells us the last thing is a wedding feast, he said.
“That has to inform ecclesiology, the study of what the Church is, and when we see that the end is a wedding feast, we know that the Church is a Bride,” Fr. Burns said.
That, in turn, informs the way we go out and evangelize and know what we’re inviting people into — how beloved the Son and Bride are.
While we are inviting everyone to be a beloved son or daughter of God, we must stress that we are also betrothed as a Church. “This is Scripture — it is all throughout the sacred texts, but rarely does it inform our mission and evangelization.”
“If we do not have this in order, we are building things that do not match the plan of God. We’re not clear on what we’re inviting people into, and our mission is unmoored,” he said.
Revelation is a very hard book to understand, Fr. Burns acknowledged, but in the last two chapters, God gives us a clear picture of where he wants us to go — the wedding feast of the Lamb, to which all of creation is pointed.
From the very beginning of creation, God has wanted to draw us into a wedding feast grounded in passion, Fr. Burns said, and the Church’s role is to help everyone get there.
“The problem is that we, in our activities at church, we barely grasp this. Evangelization, small groups, strategic planning, pastoral work, apologetics — all of which is so important — very rarely takes account of this. Sometimes that means what we are building or inviting people into does not always match the plan of God and the place he’s trying to bring us,” Fr. Burns said.
The Eucharist must be the center of drawing people into God’s love. “The Eucharist is actually meant to be deeply amorous, filled with expectant and, yes, dare I even say, even romantic love — love of longing, expectation, passion, fervor, hope and desire. The way we pray the Mass, the way we enter into adoration, the way we call people to join us on mission — if it’s to be complete, if it’s really to reflect what God has spoken to us in all of the sacred texts, we have to consider Revelation’s nuptial theme and the great end of all creation.”
“We’re called to live in that ourselves as members of the Church, the Bride, but also to be friends of the bridegroom and point out where all of this is meant to go, to help stir the Bride’s heart so that she does not forget herself and where she is meant to be headed,” he said.
Fr. John Burns, shown in this November 2021 file photo, spoke of the relationship between Jesus and his Church as a love story Thursday, July 18, during a breakout session at the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. (File photo)