On October 15, more than 6,000 people took to the streets of Midtown Manhattan—from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Broadway and back—to walk with Jesus in procession. What might have looked like another parade was an act of worship older than any modern nation, rooted in a two-millennia-old belief that Jesus Christ is fully present in the consecrated Host.
For Catholics, the Eucharist is no mere symbol, but Christ’s actual body, blood, soul, and divinity under the appearance of bread and wine. God, as the source of being itself, is not constrained by the laws of nature or appearances. When Jesus held bread and said, “This is my body,” we take him at his word. As Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Tantum Ergo, “Faith supplements for the deficiencies of the senses.”
Finally, a reason to chec…
On October 15, more than 6,000 people took to the streets of Midtown Manhattan—from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Broadway and back—to walk with Jesus in procession. What might have looked like another parade was an act of worship older than any modern nation, rooted in a two-millennia-old belief that Jesus Christ is fully present in the consecrated Host.
For Catholics, the Eucharist is no mere symbol, but Christ’s actual body, blood, soul, and divinity under the appearance of bread and wine. God, as the source of being itself, is not constrained by the laws of nature or appearances. When Jesus held bread and said, “This is my body,” we take him at his word. As Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Tantum Ergo, “Faith supplements for the deficiencies of the senses.”
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The Church has likewise taken seriously Christ’s charge to his disciples in the Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.” At every Mass, the priest takes on the person of Christ to make present his passion, death, and resurrection sacramentally. Divinity and humanity meet in those who consume the Eucharist worthily, transforming them into living tabernacles of the God who became man. Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, invoked a simple but profound maxim of the Church Fathers: “We become what we receive.”
It was this great mystery that brought the faithful into the heart of Manhattan for the Napa Institute’s sixth annual Eucharistic procession. The same Jesus who walked the streets of Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem now passed between the glass towers of Broadway.
Christ entered a wounded world not to condemn it but to make it whole again, to show humanity the power of perfect love, one that endures. “We’re here today because we know that God has not forgotten us. He still loves us,” reminded Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston, principal celebrant of the Mass preceding the procession.
Then, as now, crowds gathered to greet Jesus—the sick and the strong, the burdened and the blessed, the certain and the searching, the newcomer and the native. In the Gospels, those who encountered him walked away changed. Many were challenged, others healed, and many more shown mercy. In the Eucharist, that experience remains open. “We follow Jesus into the streets to encounter the people he redeemed,” said Msgr. Roger Landry, national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies USA.
As the golden monstrance containing the consecrated Host emerged from the Mass and the doors of St. Patrick’s, thousands joined in prayer and song. Countless others watched from sidewalks, waved from skyscrapers, and snapped pictures. Some knelt along the streets temporarily converted into aisles of worship. No one, it seemed, harangued or heckled, despite the procession’s blocking midtown traffic during a Tuesday rush hour.
For those who did not share the faith, the procession offered a portrait of a community united not by politics, commerce, or ideology, but by worship. Young finance professionals walked alongside habited nuns and monks under the Broadway billboards advertising secular salvation. Pilgrims of the Counter-Reformation must have felt much the same in experiencing the Church’s fearlessness in professing the faith of the apostles. In the splendor of its tradition, the Church makes the ancient ever new in every place and generation, including New York today.
For at least eight centuries, Eucharistic processions have wound through the streets of cities and villages across the world. They’ve borne witness to the Church’s catholicity—its universal embrace, as its Greek etymology implies. New York’s pilgrims sang in English, Spanish, and Latin, their voices weaving a single prayer of praise and thanksgiving from the strands of today’s languages and the Church’s timeless tongue. “This is the most powerful tool of evangelization,” said Timothy Busch, co-founder and chairman of the Napa Institute.
The procession ended where it began, with Benediction at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Welcoming the pilgrims back, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan remarked: “Never, ever has there been anything more potent than the walk you just took with Jesus.” He then raised the monstrance, traced the sign of the cross with it, and blessed the crowd before it departed into the October night.
For one autumn hour, New Yorkers put aside their worldly concerns and stepped into eternity. In a city—and nation—roiled by political division, the procession offered a glimpse of the heavenly Jerusalem. Urban scholar Joel Kotkin once wrote that great cities are “sacred, safe, and busy.” For that hour, midtown embodied this trinity, its activity sanctified in communion.
In a city consumed by restless ambition and anxious change, the Napa Institute’s procession pointed beyond money, power, and politics to a reality beyond our comprehension and deeper than ourselves.
Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images
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