Florida Catholic | Bishop Robert Lynch

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Bishop Lynch one-on-one

The bishop talks about his ‘Living Eucharist’ initiative and a new program for homeless.

Published: 12.21.07

Last year, after listening to his priests who wanted others to understand the Eucharist more deeply, Bishop Robert N. Lynch announced that the diocese was embarking on an evangelization and renewal program: The Living Eucharist initiative was born. Diocesan officials hope it sparks a strengthening of bonds between Catholics as they share faith; an enrichment of communal prayer and reflection on the word of God; an enhancement of the participation and celebration of the Eucharist; a development of a greater consciousness of what it means to be the body of Christ; and a sending forth of church members to act in justice and mercy. Bishop Lynch sat down recently at his office in the Pastoral Center with Carlos Briceno of the Florida Catholic to talk about the initiative, the release of his recent pastoral letter on the Eucharist, and Pinellas Hope, a project being coordinated by Catholic Charities to help the homeless achieve self-sufficiency by providing them with shelter, food and social services.

CB: You mentioned the pastoral letter was a love letter from you to people in the diocese. When did your love for the Eucharist start to blossom and why?

BISHOP LYNCH: I suppose when I was a child. There were so many devotions as a child, like Forty Hours. I remember very clearly Forty Hours (a 40-hour period of continuous prayer made before the Blessed Sacrament in solemn exposition). I remember the Mass was always the center part of my life. My grandmother used to get me up at 6 o’clock in the morning to go to 6:30 Mass at her parish in Charleston, W.Va., on Sunday morning and we would walk in the dark to get to church. I would say the Eucharist has always been a part of my life from the time I was a youth.

CB: What is the biggest challenge that most people face in trying to understand the profoundness of the Eucharist?

BISHOP LYNCH: I believe it’s to understand God’s ability and God’s power to transform bread and wine into his body and blood when it would appear that nothing has changed; that everything remains the same. And yet we take seriously the words that Jesus uttered at the Last Supper: “This is my body and this is my blood.” So I think that’s probably the biggest obstacle: trying — in this day and age when everything needs to be analyzed and everything needs to be put under a microscope — to carry it to the next step and say it’s bread and wine transformed into his body and blood. That’s the big obstacle.

CB: How did you view the Eucharist when you were young, and how do you view it now?

BISHOP LYNCH: When I was young, I didn’t fully understand it. The fullness of it comes with maturity, with age, with wisdom and with experience. There was always a reverence for the Eucharist when I was young. We didn’t casually genuflect. The genuflection when you came into church was an act of faith. We couldn’t go to Communion without a very long fast because it was such a privilege to receive the body and blood of Christ. So there were many things when I was a youngster and didn’t fully understand it that made it appear to be a very, very important moment. But as you grow older, some of those things disappear and are no longer part of the experience, but the wisdom and the understanding and the acceptance and the embrace of the Eucharist gets stronger as you grow older. More and more you realize, yes, this is his body and this is his blood.

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Bishop visits high school to talk about the Eucharist.
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CB: What kind of feedback have you been getting from people regarding the letter?

BISHOP LYNCH: Very positive, and I don’t want to just be Pollyanna-ish. I must preface my answer to you by saying that the bishop in any diocese is usually the last person to hear the truth. So probably somewhere out there, there are some people who want to pick a fight about a part of it. Or they don’t like this or they don’t like that. And I haven’t heard from them yet, and I usually do hear from them. But for the moment the response has been one of gratitude — gratitude that the time has been taken to write this and to prepare the materials that come with it. The response has been one of acceptance. That it’s been a long time coming, and “I’m glad it’s finally here and I’ve enjoyed reading it.”

We’ve had a lot of positive comments about its readability and its style. It was real tough to take an idea that was deeply theological and put it into language that most people could understand in their daily lives. First of all, I have to fess up. When I was finished, it went to a wordsmith. It went to a man named Russ Shaw, who is a well-known Catholic author. I had worked with Russ in the (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) and I have known him for a lifetime, and I called him up and he was at home on the shore, and he said, “I don’t have time for it.” And I said, “You’ve got to. I need you to look at this.” He finally agreed, and I Fed-Exed it to him, and he had it the next day and he went to work on it.

In some places, where I tend to be wordy sometimes, he brought a certain brevity. There were a lot of periods that showed up in the text that weren’t there in my text. There might have been colons and semicolons, but they ended up being periods. So let me just say I had the help of an editor … but I think my ideas, the progression, the logic of moving through the Mass in the way in which I did, the starting with the theological reality and the parts of the Mass, that’s something that I kind of understood innately, within myself. So that was a good part.

In addition, I would like to tell everybody that the first draft was 4,600 words, and then I brought it back here and I gave it to the core committee, and they took it to pieces and made all these recommendations for things that needed to be added and changed, and the 4,600 words went to 9,600 words. So what’s before you is 6,600 words. So it was small, ballooned and then came back down to its present size.

CB: I realize it’s still early in the process, but what kind of impact has the Living Eucharist initiative made already, based on what you’ve heard from others and seen firsthand?

BISHOP LYNCH: Too early. But let me say three things have happened that are all good. First of all, so many of our parishes took seriously the book, “From Maintenance to Mission.” It established in all of our minds the environment in which we were going to teach, what’s happened in the church since the second Vatican Council. The second part of it was many parishes utilized another little book from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee called “Eucharist: Source and Summit,” and they’ve had great discussions about that. So the place where we were going to build the platform was analyzed. The platform was built. The pastoral letter is the leap off the platform into the pool, and the pool is the next three years — breaking open the word, sharing the Eucharist and being whom we receive and taking it out into the world. Talk to me in four years and I’ll let you know. But for the moment, everything is on track.

CB: Tell me why Pinellas Hope, the project to help the homeless become self-sufficient, was so important to you.

BISHOP LYNCH: I was embarrassed by what happened here in St. Petersburg last winter — when the tents were cut (by police who were trying to get the homeless to move from a downtown area) and the general approach to the homeless that was part of last winter’s scene. I thought to myself then that we as a community could do better and we as a church need to be a catalyst in the community. We stepped in to offer our assistance at the low moment during last winter’s efforts to take care of the homeless. We were able to accomplish a number of good things for about 300 people whom we were able to take care of during that period of time. And it raised the question of what were we going to do next year. We have to have a better plan. What has emerged as Pinellas Hope has been a wonderful coming together of the political world — the county; the city; the various municipalities that make up Pinellas County; Catholic Charities as a lead charitable agency; churches, some Catholic and some non-Catholic; that are all participating in Pinellas Hope. It’s really kind of a miracle on 49th Street (the street in Clearwater off which the Pinellas Hope site is located).

CB: What has been the greatest inspiration for you to try to be Christ for others?

BISHOP LYNCH: Probably the person who has had the greatest influence in my life and in my ministry as priest and bishop has been the late Cardinal (Joseph) Bernardin (from the Archdiocese of Chicago) with whom I was both close and friendly. He preached my ordination Mass here at St. Jude’s Cathedral when I was ordained bishop. His openness to church, his lack of being threatened sometimes by the vociferous left and the vociferous right, but being relatively calm to stay in the center has been a very strong formative influence in my life.

CB: What is your biggest hope and prayer for the Living Eucharist initiative?

BISHOP LYNCH: That every Catholic currently attending Mass better understands and more deeply embraces this great gift of the Eucharist. Secondly, that we can use the Eucharist as a tool to reach out to those who have left us and say, “Come back. If we offended you, if we hurt you, we are truly sorry. We’ll try to do better, but you didn’t just leave us, you left a eucharistically present Jesus in your life when you chose to leave the Catholic Church, so come back and enjoy the special gift that we have.” And the third thing I would hope for, as time goes by and as this is successful, is better celebrations of the Eucharist in our parishes. I think we have to get away from the service-station mentality where people just come in on Sunday for a fill-up. They need more than a fill-up. They need a car wash, they need a fill- up, they need to stop in to the inside and maybe buy something to drink or something to eat. It’s got to be a whole experience that lasts after they drive out of the service station. When we pull in for gas, you can’t tell me six hours later the name of the place of the service station where you gassed up. That’s true for a lot of Sunday Masses. You can’t remember them. They’re totally not memorable. We need to make our celebration of the Eucharist a much more memorable and a much more participatory — and I underline that word participatory — moment in the lives of our Catholics.

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