Ten observations about the Eucharist-at-ICE incident in Illinois

Two days ago, on Saturday, October 12th:

A delegation of Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders were among hundreds of people from Chicago and the suburbs who marched from Maywood to Broadview Saturday in hopes of delivering Holy Communion to detainees at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility.

The Chicago Sun-Times further reports that “after approaching Illinois State Police officers standing outside the facility, the group’s communion request was rebuffed.”

There has now been much debate and criticism on social media about this “Eucharistic procession”.

Here are some observations, many or all overlooked by secular outlets:

• Access to detention and restricted government facilities is not “on-demand.” Priests know this. Chaplains know that they need to make prior arrangements to enter such places.

• If, as they allege, priests were denied access to illegal immigrants detained in that Illinois facility through normal processes, what did they expect this act to do? There are procedures to address that denial, including litigation. They cannot have imagined they would be admitted in this fashion, which makes this a case of using the Eucharist as a protest stunt.

• Further evidence why this is a protest stunt and not a serious liturgical action is that, even in Catholic countries where displays of faith in the public square were commonplace, priests brought the Eucharist to those in need (e.g., the sick) in a concealed pyx, often preceded by an altar boy with a candle, not an open monstrance processing through the streets.

• Public processions of the Eucharist in a monstrance through the streets were usually reserved for Corpus Christi, a phenomenon that went into eclipse in the United States in the late 1960s and only lately revived by more tradition-minded priests.

• Public processions of the Eucharist in a monstrance are connected to adoration of the Eucharist, not distribution of Communion.

• The revised “Rite for Holy Communion and Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery Outside Mass,” which came into effect in 2024, does not envision distribution of the Eucharist outside Mass alongside roadsides and apart from a liturgical service normally in a liturgical setting (i.e., a church).

• Many of the liturgists commenting on that revised Rite have opined that the disconnect of “Communion services” from Mass is inappropriate, and so we should even consider denying Catholics gathered in churches Communion from the reserved sacrament absent celebration of the Eucharist.

• Today’s priests rarely distribute Communion outside of Mass except in exigent circumstances to reinforce the liturgical connection of Communion and to avoid recollection of the “bad old days” before Vatican II, when priests distributed Communion to the faithful independently of Mass.

• When public processions of the Eucharist were organized throughout the United States in 2024 en route to the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, the Archdiocese of Chicago, ironically, was one of the few that objected to such public displays of Eucharistic faith.

• When the Catholic bishops of the United States were asked to address the Eucharistic incoherence of providing the Bread of Life to Culture of Death politicians who were baptized Catholics, the Archbishop of Chicago was among those who claimed such behavior “weaponized” and “politicized” the Eucharist. Since this procession did not result in admission to the Maywood ICE facility nor had any reasonable expectation it would, did this act not constitute a “weaponization” of the Eucharist in pursuit of a “political” end?