“Let’s have a show of hands for those who were baptized, made their first Communion and were confirmed at the Easter Vigil,” Bishop Nelson Perez said at the 4:30 p.m. Mass on June 22 at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist
Dozens of hands popped up around the church.
He told the neophytes, or new Catholics, that was the singular most important day of their lives. “You may not understand it now, but you will,” he added. The bishop said Jesus’ presence in body and soul is real. “His presence is in our midst. He told us he is food and drink for us. He sustains us. How blessed are we all and how blessed are you to be able to share in the Eucharist,” he said.
Bishop Perez told the congregation that he returned recently from a retreat trip to Rome. “There are bishops and priests everywhere in Rome. Bishops and priests come and go. Bishop (Daniel) Thomas came and went,” he quipped, pointing to Toledo Bishop Daniel Thomas, who concelebrated the Mass. He was referring to Bishop Thomas’ nine months as apostolic administrator of the diocese before Bishop Perez’s appointment and installation. Bishop Thomas was in town on June 22 to attend an event.
“Since that night (the night of the Last Supper), many have come and gone, but the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is stable. It’s always there. It transcends history, even though people come and go,” the bishop said.
He’s celebrated Mass in many places across the United States and beyond, including in Rome and in a tiny chapel at the diocesan mission in El Salvador, but the liturgy and the Eucharist are the same, Bishop Perez said.
He recalled meeting a young woman who had been an evangelical Christian and converted to Catholicism. Her conversion came at a great personal cost, he said, and caused much tension in her family.
“She was filled with the fire of the Sprit and talked to me for a long time about her passion for the faith,” he said. When asked what got her so excited, Bishop Perez said she answered -- without skipping a beat – with one word: “the Eucharist.”
“The Eucharist is at the heart of what we do. It sustains us. How blessed we are,” he added.