I still remember the strangest Holy Thursday ever for so many of us, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
We were unable to attend the Mass of the Last Supper to celebrate the Institution of the Eucharist.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton knew our pain. In 1807, when she moved several miles away from her parish church, she lamented “The first Sunday of exile from his Tabernacle.” Not having the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament nearby was enough to distress her.
But she knew the pain of a much more significant “exile from the tabernacle” earlier in life, just before she became a Catholic. Reflecting on her experience helped me during the pandemic.
La historia comienza con Isabel descubriendo la Presencia Real de la Eucaristía en el extranjero. Había viajado a Italia con su marido con la esperanza de que un cambio de clima curara su tuberculosis. No fue así. Pero en Italia fue testigo de la piedad eucarística de los católicos.
Su marido Guillermo murió en diciembre de 1803 y en el verano de 1804, Isabel ya estaba fascinada por la idea de la Presencia Real de Jesucristo en la Eucaristía. Escribe sobre un incidente en el que asistía a misa con un protestante inglés.
“At the very moment the priest was doing the most sacred action they call the elevation,” she said, “this wild young man said loud in my ear ‘this is what they call their real presence.’ My very heart trembled with shame and sorrow for his unfeeling interruption of their sacred adoration for all around was dead silence and many were prostrated.”
She said, “Involuntarily I bent from him to the pavement and thought secretly on the word of St. Paul with starting tears ‘they discern not the Lord’s body.’”
St. Elizabeth Ann found herself longing for faith in the Real Presence. In one letter she wrote, “My sister dear, how happy would we be if we believed what these dear souls believe, that they possess God in the Sacrament and that he remains in their churches and is carried to them when they are sick.”
La atormentaba el pensamiento de lo maravilloso que sería que la Presencia Real fuera verdadera.
“When they carry the Blessed Sacrament under my window,” she wrote, “I feel the full loneliness and sadness of my case. I cannot stop the tears at the thought. My God, how happy would I be even so far away from all so dear, if I could find you in the church as they do.”
Elizabeth returned to New York and continued to attend Episcopalian services, but was turning toward the Catholic Church — literally.
“I got in a side pew which turned my face towards the Catholic church in the next street, and found myself twenty times speaking to the Blessed Sacrament there instead of looking at the naked altar where I was or minding the routine of prayers,” she said.
Then, her separation from the Blessed Sacrament became almost too much to bear, like for so many of us during the pandemic.
Elizabeth must have betrayed her feelings about the Blessed Sacrament because her Protestant friends started to challenge her. “How can you believe that there are as many gods as there are millions of altars and tens of millions of blessed hosts all over the world?” one asked.
Su respuesta demuestra que su anhelo se había convertido en fe:
“Again I can but smile at his earnest words, for the whole of my cogitations about it are reduced to one thought … it is God who does it, the same God who fed so many thousands with the little barley loaves and little fishes, multiplying them of course in the hands which distributed them…”
In fact, she said, “nothing is so very hard to believe in it, since it is he who does it. Years ago I read in some old book, when you say a thing is a miracle and you do not understand it, you say nothing against the mystery itself, but only acknowledge your limited knowledge and comprehension which does not understand a thousand things you must yet own to be true.”
She even said, startlingly, that God makes less sense if the Eucharist isn’t true:
“If the religion which gives to the world, (at least to so great a part of it) the heavenly consolations attached to the belief of the Presence of God in the blessed Sacrament … is the work and contrivance of men and priests as they say, then God seems not as earnest for our happiness as these contrivers.”
St. Elizabeth Ann compared the Catholic tabernacle to the Ark of the Covenant in the ancient Jewish Temple and lamented, in the Protestant world, “our churches with nothing but naked walls and our altars unadorned.”
In her morning walks the beauty of nature was lost on her. “I see nothing but the little bright cross on St. Peter’s steeple,” marking where Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is.
It is in Lent of 1805 when she finally gets her wish. When she is finally able to receive the Blessed Sacrament, Elizabeth’s delight is inspiring.
“At last Amabilia — at last. GOD IS MINE and I AM HIS,” she writes in one letter. “I HAVE RECEIVED HIM.”
St. Elizabeth Ann counted the moments that brought her “nearer the moment he would enter the poor poor little dwelling so all his own. And when he did — the first thought, I remember, was ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered!’ for it seemed to me my King had come to take his throne, and instead of the humble tender welcome I had expected to give him, it was but a triumph of joy and gladness that the deliverer was come.”
No hay nada tan triste como saber que Dios mismo está cerca, esperando, pero sólo fuera de nuestro alcance.
The very first Holy Thursday was marked by the hushed awe the Apostles felt at their first experience of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament.
This Holy Thursday let us remember St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s extraordinary yearning and love for the Eucharist, and the tremendous joy we feel whenever we receive Him.
TOM HOOPES, autor más reciente de El Rosario de San Juan Pablo II, es escritor residente en el Benedictine College de Kansas, donde imparte clases. Es anfitrión de La extraordinaria Story podcast sobre la vida de Cristo. Su libro Lo que dijo realmente el Papa Francisco ya está disponible en Audible. Antiguo reportero en la zona de Washington, D.C., fue secretario de prensa del Presidente del Comité de Medios y Arbitrios de la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos y pasó 10 años como editor del periódico National Catholic Register y de la revista Faith & Family. Su trabajo aparece con frecuencia en el Register, Aleteia y Catholic Digest. Vive en Atchison, Kansas, con su esposa, April, y tiene nueve hijos.
Imagen: La Última Cena, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574).
Esta reflexión se publicó anteriormente. Click here to read all our Seton Reflections.