Youtube Interviews
In this episode of Roadmap to Heaven, host Adam Wright is joined by Sister Alicia Torres, a member of the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago. Sister Torres shares about an upcoming newsletter, the Heart of the Revival Newsletter by the National Eucharistic Revival.
Sister Torres explains the term Mystagogy, and the new series titled “Beautiful Light: A Paschal Mystagogy” which will explore the meaning and significance of the Eucharist. The series aims to align with the current Eucharistic Revival and highlight the Most Holy Eucharist.
She describes how each article in the series will invite readers to imagine a specific moment of the Mass, provide reflection questions, feature excerpts from the writings of the church fathers, and include practical catechesis by various writers. The aim is to creatively engage readers and deepen their awareness of the mysteries of the faith.
Sister Torres also expresses concern over the decrease in Catholic mass attendance and highlights the role of liturgical catechesis in deepening understanding and appreciation of the mysteries of the faith. She points out how the new series will draw from the mystical tradition to engage readers and encourage further exploration of the liturgy.
Lastly, Sister Torres discusses the charism of her religious community, the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago. She explains the Franciscans’ dedication to living the Gospel and serving the poor, rooted in their spirituality centered on Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. They engage in daily prayer routines, Mass celebrations, Eucharistic adoration, and scripture study. She also mentions their work with the poor in Chicago, evangelization through retreats, and their hope to establish perpetual adoration.
Overall, this episode of Roadmap to Heaven provides insight into Mystagogy, how the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago are participating in the revival, and how Catholics everywhere can get involved.
Adam Wright:
We’re happy to be speaking today with Sister Alicia Torres, a member of the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago, a religious community that carries out the mission of the church through service to the poor, evangelization, and teaching. Sister, it’s so good to have you with us on Roadmap to Heaven today.
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Thanks so much, Adam. It’s good to be with you.
Adam Wright:
So we are talking about the Eucharist Revival over the next several months. We’ve already been in this at the diocesan level, we’re starting to look towards the national level and the big Congress that will be happening in 2024, and as part of that, one of the things that’s been unveiled is a new series on Mystagogy that you are involved with. It’s going to begin on April 13th and run through May 25th. Actually, liturgically speaking, Divine Mercy Sunday through Pentecost. So what a wonderful thing. That’s a word we’ve heard before, Mystagogy, and this is titled “Beautiful Light: A Paschal Mystagogy”, but it’s one that I even I have to admit, Sister, that I know it’s a Catholic word. I know it’s a good word, but if you asked me to define it right now, I’d be at a loss. So could you shed some light for our listeners, and for me, on what we’re talking about?
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Absolutely. And that word “light” is so evocative of the whole mystagogical tradition, Adam, and simply put, Mystagogy is a very fancy and historically rooted term that talks about liturgical catechesis. Meaning, how do we help people to deepen their understanding of what happens in the liturgical rights of our church, especially the Mass? And so when you think about Mystagogy, some people might think about the church fathers, and they had a profoundly vast tradition of Mystagogy in the early church. And oftentimes, we’ll also think about newly received members of the church, sometimes we call them neophytes. In the early church, you may remember that until one was baptized, they didn’t actually participate in the liturgy of the eucharist and the part of the mass where we experience the reliving of the paschal mystery, the consecration of the bread and wine, becoming the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eucharist.
So there were many things that men and women preparing to be received to the church had to wait to experience until after they were baptized. So once a person was baptized, their formation didn’t end, it continued. And that was what was known as this mystagogical journey, or tradition, or time for the newly baptized member. And so even to this day, those who enter our church through the order of Christian initiation, throughout the country, there should be included in that process after the Easter vigil, after receiving those Easter sacraments, to continue to go deeper into these beautiful mysteries of our faith, and that’s what the mystagogical tradition is all about. But perhaps there’s a great opportunity to reconsider this because I think in a lot of places, there aren’t a lot of resources for people to be able to take advantage of going deeper into these mysteries.
Adam Wright:
So I want to take a step back here for a second because you said for everyone who goes through the order of Christian initiation and it’s very tempting to think, “Well, Sister’s talking just about those who went through RCIA this past year and are coming into the church at the Easter vigil.” But if I’m correct, Sister, all of us who are baptized and confirmed to have been through Christian initiation, we just did not go through it in the truncated version of RCIA. We’ve been doing this our whole lives. So even we are called to grow in our knowledge and study some more and go through this mystagogical process. So what a wonderful opportunity this is. Now this series is going to be titled “Beautiful Light: A Paschal Mystagogy” and you mentioned that all Mystagogy is somewhat liturgical catechesis in nature. Is it safe to say that in this time of Eucharistic Revival, that’s where we’re going to be focusing, is on our Lord and the Most Holy Eucharist?
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
You know, absolutely. Within the context of the Mass, Adam, that’s where we want to focus with this first series that we are serving out through the Heart of the Revival Newsletter, which is the national newsletter of the National Eucharistic Revival. So, of course, the revival is an initiative, an inspiration of our bishops, that they have included so many wonderful people around the country in to help make it happen. So we’ve got Tim Glemkowski and his team at the Congress, we’ve got people at the USCCB with David Spasia, the secretary for catechism evangelization, and then people like myself who are helping with the newsletter. So there’s so many people around the country that are, in a sense, helping incarnate the reality of the National Eucharistic Revival.
And yet, at the heart of the crisis that this revival’s really in response to, now the data points that we received after the CARA study last summer indicate that 13% of Catholics are attending Mass regularly on Sunday, which is down from 20% pre-COVID numbers. So that’s absolutely tragic and really a distressing number. For me, when I look at that, you know, and you can probably hear it in my voice, I want to look at it with this opportunity mindset, because otherwise it can get very discouraging, and even depressing, that the overwhelming majority of baptized Catholics do not experience the love and mercy available to us through the sacraments, especially the Mass, the Eucharist. So part of the beauty of our tradition of catechesis, and particularly this tradition of liturgical catechesis is that we want to help people to experience the deeper realities and the deeper mysteries that are offered to us through the liturgy, particularly the celebration of the Mass.
So for every Catholic, we need to be evangelized before we can really be open to catechesis. And that’s really what we wanted to offer through this new series, was a creative way to draw from our mystagogical tradition, where we’re trying to inspire people, our readers, by the way that we present it so that their hearts are really open to going deeper into these mysteries. To understanding why is it that we have the preface at Mass, or what is the doxology at the end of the Eucharistic prayer all about? Going deeper with those things, through evoking the imagination and then touching the heart, and then informing the mind. So that’s our hope with this, and it’s really for all of us. I mean, you probably saw The Holy Father’s letter, Desiderio Desideravi. It’s hard to pronounce that quickly. But what he’s really calling a church to is a renewed liturgical formation: at the heart of that is that catechesis.
Adam Wright:
So when we sign up, and not if we sign up, because we’re gonna sign up, friends. Let’s do this. Let’s grow in our knowledge of the Mass, and of liturgy, and of our Lord’s presence, and the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament. But when we sign up, Sister, what are we in store for? Are we talking that we’ve got to set aside ten hours a week here for study? Because that could be a little intimidating if you’re going to tell me 10 hours, but I have a feeling that’s not the case.
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Absolutely. You know, that was exactly where my heart and the heart of our editorial team was at when we began to imagine this and consider what we could do. We wanted it to get especially accessible for people today. Also, we wanted to design it where it was modular in nature, meaning that there were different styles incorporated into each article so that we could capture attention in different ways and help the users, the readers, our brothers and sisters in Christ really, to engage with the content. So each issue, or each article that is part of the series will have really four parts to it.
The first part will invite the readers to imagine a particular moment of the Mass. Then there will be a reflection question to kind of stay with that for a little bit. Almost in a sense in the tradition of Ignation contemplation, how Saint Ignatius helps us to reflect on stories from the gospels, we use that same method, trying to capture different elements of the imagination and the senses to enter into this moment of Mass. And then to reflect on it with a question because an essential component of the mystagogical tradition is actually experiencing the rites themselves. So we want to help our readers experience the rite, even if they’re not in the context of Mass, through reading something that’s written very creatively and imaginatively.
And then from there, we also want to introduce the whole church, or reintroduce the whole church, to the beautiful writings of the church fathers from the first several hundred years of our tradition. So each of those short imaginative reflections on a rite from the Mass is then paired with a short excerpt from one of the church fathers that relates to a theme that we found drawn from that rite in the Mass. So we might have something from Saint Cyril of Jerusalem or from Saint Augustine, some of our great minds in the early church to root us in that tradition. Then we’ve invited seven different writers, some of our archbishops, some laypeople, consecrated. We have a priest, a Canadian priest, Father Harrison Ayre, who just recently published a beautiful book on the sacramental worldview. So we have some wonderful writers that we wanted to have a variety of people from different walks of life who’ve faithfully been following Jesus their whole lives to share with us in this tradition of liturgical catechesis.
So each of our writers will offer a short catechesis on the right, and then something that’s incredibly essential to Mystagogy is making it practical for people. So now that I’ve reflected on this, imagined this, experienced some of the tradition, and learned a little bit about this, what does it mean for my everyday life? Tell me why this matters. How can I allow what I’m learning and reflecting on to affect my heart and my actions in my everyday life so that I can live with Jesus, and for Jesus, and go on mission with Him through this deepening awareness of these beautiful mysteries of our faith?
Adam Wright:
This sounds absolutely wonderful, and I can’t wait for the first newsletter to come out. Now, to sign up to receive the newsletters, if I have this correct, and Sister, please correct me if I don’t. We just go to EucharisticRevival.org/heart-of-the-revival-newsletter. So it’s “heart of the revival newsletter” with a dash in between each of those words, but EucharisticRevival.org/heart-of-the-revival-newsletter with dashes in between all of that. And it will just come straight to our inboxes if I have this correct.
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Yeah. And it’s actually even easier. You could do EucharisticRevival.org/newsletter and it’ll take you to the same page.
Adam Wright:
Oh, see, Sister, now you’re just offering us extra grace here by giving us that URL. I tried to make things overly complicated here. I think this is going to be a wonderful opportunity. Let’s all grow in our love of our Lord. And one of the ways we grow in that love is to know more, not just about Him and not just more about the church, but about our rites and the law of prayer is the law of belief, as they say. So this is a wonderful opportunity. Before we let you go, Sister, just because we love to spotlight vocations on the show here, really quick. Could you share with us what is the charism of the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago?
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Sure, Adam. You know, so the charism, we really understand that as the gift of the Holy Spirit to the founder or foundress of a particular religious community. And that charism, that way of life, responds to specific need of the church at a specific time. So, obviously, we’re Franciscans, and Saint Francis of Assisi was inspired to live the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, to preach the gospel and to serve the very poor, those in need. And so for these last 800 years, Franciscans have been doing that in many ways. Here on the west side of Chicago at our Lady of the Angels Mission, it’s not any different for us as participants of the Eucharist of Chicago. Our name kind of gives way to it, that Saint Francis of Assisi, although he’s often word associated with garden statues and loving god’s creation. That’s certainly true, but he, like every saint, is a profoundly eucharistic saint. He had a tremendous love for our Lord, and he was just bewildered in the most profound way, over the incarnation. He just was utterly fascinated that by that from the moment that he discovered that truth, that the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. So in our Franciscan spirituality, Jesus Christ in the creche, Christ on the cross and Christ in the Eucharist, for us is essential to understanding who we are as followers of Jesus. So those devotions to our Lord and His humanity, but then the devotion of the faith that we have in His real presence here in the eucharist.
So our life is rooted in our prayer. Whether that is, of course, every day, celebrating the Mass together as a community, having times of Eucharist adoration, our spiritual readings, studying scripture, etcetera, the communal life, the fraternal life, living together, having our meals together, our prayers together. Then going out and serving God’s people. So we work with the very poor on the west side of Chicago, a lot of basic needs, but of course, as followers of Jesus, as Catholics, as religious, we don’t just do it as social workers, but we do it with our eyes to eternity. We want everyone to get to Heaven. So we believe that if we love people with the love of Jesus that He’s placed in our hearts, then we can help people open up to that relationship with Jesus themselves so they can come to know Him and love Him and walk that road to Heaven with Him.
We also help teach religion in some poor Catholic schools, so I get to teach twice a week kindergarten through 4th grade, and that’s a huge blessing. We do evangelization-centered work, retreats, etcetera. My service with this newsletter is part of that charism as well. And so service to the poor, evangelization, and teaching would be a simple way to talk about our apostolic work. And here, we have a beautiful Adoration Chapel on our campus where our mission is, and we have a hope and a plan to build up eventually to perpetual Adoration here and anywhere else that our community might be invited to serve in the years to come. So it’s just a real joy to follow Jesus in the footsteps of Saint Francis, and Bishop Lombardo, who was not a bishop when he founded our community, is our founder and superior. So we’re really blessed, for his leadership and guidance over the past number of years since we were founded. Now he’s one of the Episcopal Vickers in the Archdiocese of Chicago. So he’s still with us and then also serving the church by overseeing the local area here on the west side of Chicago.
Adam Wright:
Absolutely beautiful, Sister. That is so wonderful to hear the great works that you and the other sisters are doing on the west side of Chicago. I want to thank you for being with us on Roadmap to Heaven. And again, for the Eucharistic Revival, that part’s simple, EucharisticRevival.org, and not to overcomplicate it for the newsletter, it’s EucharisticRevival.org/newsletter. Don’t add all those extra words I added earlier. We’ll make it simple for you. We are going to take a break here, but don’t go anywhere. We will be back after this.
Adam Wright:
We’re happy to be speaking today with Sister Alicia Torres, a member of the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago, a religious community that carries out the mission of the church through service to the poor, evangelization, and teaching. Sister, it’s so good to have you with us on Roadmap to Heaven today.
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Thanks so much, Adam. It’s good to be with you.
Adam Wright:
So we are talking about the Eucharist Revival over the next several months. We’ve already been in this at the diocesan level, we’re starting to look towards the national level and the big Congress that will be happening in 2024, and as part of that, one of the things that’s been unveiled is a new series on Mystagogy that you are involved with. It’s going to begin on April 13th and run through May 25th. Actually, liturgically speaking, Divine Mercy Sunday through Pentecost. So what a wonderful thing. That’s a word we’ve heard before, Mystagogy, and this is titled “Beautiful Light: A Paschal Mystagogy”, but it’s one that I even I have to admit, Sister, that I know it’s a Catholic word. I know it’s a good word, but if you asked me to define it right now, I’d be at a loss. So could you shed some light for our listeners, and for me, on what we’re talking about?
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Absolutely. And that word “light” is so evocative of the whole mystagogical tradition, Adam, and simply put, Mystagogy is a very fancy and historically rooted term that talks about liturgical catechesis. Meaning, how do we help people to deepen their understanding of what happens in the liturgical rights of our church, especially the Mass? And so when you think about Mystagogy, some people might think about the church fathers, and they had a profoundly vast tradition of Mystagogy in the early church. And oftentimes, we’ll also think about newly received members of the church, sometimes we call them neophytes. In the early church, you may remember that until one was baptized, they didn’t actually participate in the liturgy of the eucharist and the part of the mass where we experience the reliving of the paschal mystery, the consecration of the bread and wine, becoming the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eucharist.
So there were many things that men and women preparing to be received to the church had to wait to experience until after they were baptized. So once a person was baptized, their formation didn’t end, it continued. And that was what was known as this mystagogical journey, or tradition, or time for the newly baptized member. And so even to this day, those who enter our church through the order of Christian initiation, throughout the country, there should be included in that process after the Easter vigil, after receiving those Easter sacraments, to continue to go deeper into these beautiful mysteries of our faith, and that’s what the mystagogical tradition is all about. But perhaps there’s a great opportunity to reconsider this because I think in a lot of places, there aren’t a lot of resources for people to be able to take advantage of going deeper into these mysteries.
Adam Wright:
So I want to take a step back here for a second because you said for everyone who goes through the order of Christian initiation and it’s very tempting to think, “Well, Sister’s talking just about those who went through RCIA this past year and are coming into the church at the Easter vigil.” But if I’m correct, Sister, all of us who are baptized and confirmed to have been through Christian initiation, we just did not go through it in the truncated version of RCIA. We’ve been doing this our whole lives. So even we are called to grow in our knowledge and study some more and go through this mystagogical process. So what a wonderful opportunity this is. Now this series is going to be titled “Beautiful Light: A Paschal Mystagogy” and you mentioned that all Mystagogy is somewhat liturgical catechesis in nature. Is it safe to say that in this time of Eucharistic Revival, that’s where we’re going to be focusing, is on our Lord and the Most Holy Eucharist?
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
You know, absolutely. Within the context of the Mass, Adam, that’s where we want to focus with this first series that we are serving out through the Heart of the Revival Newsletter, which is the national newsletter of the National Eucharistic Revival. So, of course, the revival is an initiative, an inspiration of our bishops, that they have included so many wonderful people around the country in to help make it happen. So we’ve got Tim Glemkowski and his team at the Congress, we’ve got people at the USCCB with David Spasia, the secretary for catechism evangelization, and then people like myself who are helping with the newsletter. So there’s so many people around the country that are, in a sense, helping incarnate the reality of the National Eucharistic Revival.
And yet, at the heart of the crisis that this revival’s really in response to, now the data points that we received after the CARA study last summer indicate that 13% of Catholics are attending Mass regularly on Sunday, which is down from 20% pre-COVID numbers. So that’s absolutely tragic and really a distressing number. For me, when I look at that, you know, and you can probably hear it in my voice, I want to look at it with this opportunity mindset, because otherwise it can get very discouraging, and even depressing, that the overwhelming majority of baptized Catholics do not experience the love and mercy available to us through the sacraments, especially the Mass, the Eucharist. So part of the beauty of our tradition of catechesis, and particularly this tradition of liturgical catechesis is that we want to help people to experience the deeper realities and the deeper mysteries that are offered to us through the liturgy, particularly the celebration of the Mass.
So for every Catholic, we need to be evangelized before we can really be open to catechesis. And that’s really what we wanted to offer through this new series, was a creative way to draw from our mystagogical tradition, where we’re trying to inspire people, our readers, by the way that we present it so that their hearts are really open to going deeper into these mysteries. To understanding why is it that we have the preface at Mass, or what is the doxology at the end of the Eucharistic prayer all about? Going deeper with those things, through evoking the imagination and then touching the heart, and then informing the mind. So that’s our hope with this, and it’s really for all of us. I mean, you probably saw The Holy Father’s letter, Desiderio Desideravi. It’s hard to pronounce that quickly. But what he’s really calling a church to is a renewed liturgical formation: at the heart of that is that catechesis.
Adam Wright:
So when we sign up, and not if we sign up, because we’re gonna sign up, friends. Let’s do this. Let’s grow in our knowledge of the Mass, and of liturgy, and of our Lord’s presence, and the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament. But when we sign up, Sister, what are we in store for? Are we talking that we’ve got to set aside ten hours a week here for study? Because that could be a little intimidating if you’re going to tell me 10 hours, but I have a feeling that’s not the case.
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Absolutely. You know, that was exactly where my heart and the heart of our editorial team was at when we began to imagine this and consider what we could do. We wanted it to get especially accessible for people today. Also, we wanted to design it where it was modular in nature, meaning that there were different styles incorporated into each article so that we could capture attention in different ways and help the users, the readers, our brothers and sisters in Christ really, to engage with the content. So each issue, or each article that is part of the series will have really four parts to it.
The first part will invite the readers to imagine a particular moment of the Mass. Then there will be a reflection question to kind of stay with that for a little bit. Almost in a sense in the tradition of Ignation contemplation, how Saint Ignatius helps us to reflect on stories from the gospels, we use that same method, trying to capture different elements of the imagination and the senses to enter into this moment of Mass. And then to reflect on it with a question because an essential component of the mystagogical tradition is actually experiencing the rites themselves. So we want to help our readers experience the rite, even if they’re not in the context of Mass, through reading something that’s written very creatively and imaginatively.
And then from there, we also want to introduce the whole church, or reintroduce the whole church, to the beautiful writings of the church fathers from the first several hundred years of our tradition. So each of those short imaginative reflections on a rite from the Mass is then paired with a short excerpt from one of the church fathers that relates to a theme that we found drawn from that rite in the Mass. So we might have something from Saint Cyril of Jerusalem or from Saint Augustine, some of our great minds in the early church to root us in that tradition. Then we’ve invited seven different writers, some of our archbishops, some laypeople, consecrated. We have a priest, a Canadian priest, Father Harrison Ayre, who just recently published a beautiful book on the sacramental worldview. So we have some wonderful writers that we wanted to have a variety of people from different walks of life who’ve faithfully been following Jesus their whole lives to share with us in this tradition of liturgical catechesis.
So each of our writers will offer a short catechesis on the right, and then something that’s incredibly essential to Mystagogy is making it practical for people. So now that I’ve reflected on this, imagined this, experienced some of the tradition, and learned a little bit about this, what does it mean for my everyday life? Tell me why this matters. How can I allow what I’m learning and reflecting on to affect my heart and my actions in my everyday life so that I can live with Jesus, and for Jesus, and go on mission with Him through this deepening awareness of these beautiful mysteries of our faith?
Adam Wright:
This sounds absolutely wonderful, and I can’t wait for the first newsletter to come out. Now, to sign up to receive the newsletters, if I have this correct, and Sister, please correct me if I don’t. We just go to EucharisticRevival.org/heart-of-the-revival-newsletter. So it’s “heart of the revival newsletter” with a dash in between each of those words, but EucharisticRevival.org/heart-of-the-revival-newsletter with dashes in between all of that. And it will just come straight to our inboxes if I have this correct.
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Yeah. And it’s actually even easier. You could do EucharisticRevival.org/newsletter and it’ll take you to the same page.
Adam Wright:
Oh, see, Sister, now you’re just offering us extra grace here by giving us that URL. I tried to make things overly complicated here. I think this is going to be a wonderful opportunity. Let’s all grow in our love of our Lord. And one of the ways we grow in that love is to know more, not just about Him and not just more about the church, but about our rites and the law of prayer is the law of belief, as they say. So this is a wonderful opportunity. Before we let you go, Sister, just because we love to spotlight vocations on the show here, really quick. Could you share with us what is the charism of the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago?
Sr. Alicia Torres, F.E.:
Sure, Adam. You know, so the charism, we really understand that as the gift of the Holy Spirit to the founder or foundress of a particular religious community. And that charism, that way of life, responds to specific need of the church at a specific time. So, obviously, we’re Franciscans, and Saint Francis of Assisi was inspired to live the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, to preach the gospel and to serve the very poor, those in need. And so for these last 800 years, Franciscans have been doing that in many ways. Here on the west side of Chicago at our Lady of the Angels Mission, it’s not any different for us as participants of the Eucharist of Chicago. Our name kind of gives way to it, that Saint Francis of Assisi, although he’s often word associated with garden statues and loving god’s creation. That’s certainly true, but he, like every saint, is a profoundly eucharistic saint. He had a tremendous love for our Lord, and he was just bewildered in the most profound way, over the incarnation. He just was utterly fascinated that by that from the moment that he discovered that truth, that the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. So in our Franciscan spirituality, Jesus Christ in the creche, Christ on the cross and Christ in the Eucharist, for us is essential to understanding who we are as followers of Jesus. So those devotions to our Lord and His humanity, but then the devotion of the faith that we have in His real presence here in the eucharist.
So our life is rooted in our prayer. Whether that is, of course, every day, celebrating the Mass together as a community, having times of Eucharist adoration, our spiritual readings, studying scripture, etcetera, the communal life, the fraternal life, living together, having our meals together, our prayers together. Then going out and serving God’s people. So we work with the very poor on the west side of Chicago, a lot of basic needs, but of course, as followers of Jesus, as Catholics, as religious, we don’t just do it as social workers, but we do it with our eyes to eternity. We want everyone to get to Heaven. So we believe that if we love people with the love of Jesus that He’s placed in our hearts, then we can help people open up to that relationship with Jesus themselves so they can come to know Him and love Him and walk that road to Heaven with Him.
We also help teach religion in some poor Catholic schools, so I get to teach twice a week kindergarten through 4th grade, and that’s a huge blessing. We do evangelization-centered work, retreats, etcetera. My service with this newsletter is part of that charism as well. And so service to the poor, evangelization, and teaching would be a simple way to talk about our apostolic work. And here, we have a beautiful Adoration Chapel on our campus where our mission is, and we have a hope and a plan to build up eventually to perpetual Adoration here and anywhere else that our community might be invited to serve in the years to come. So it’s just a real joy to follow Jesus in the footsteps of Saint Francis, and Bishop Lombardo, who was not a bishop when he founded our community, is our founder and superior. So we’re really blessed, for his leadership and guidance over the past number of years since we were founded. Now he’s one of the Episcopal Vickers in the Archdiocese of Chicago. So he’s still with us and then also serving the church by overseeing the local area here on the west side of Chicago.
Adam Wright:
Absolutely beautiful, Sister. That is so wonderful to hear the great works that you and the other sisters are doing on the west side of Chicago. I want to thank you for being with us on Roadmap to Heaven. And again, for the Eucharistic Revival, that part’s simple, EucharisticRevival.org, and not to overcomplicate it for the newsletter, it’s EucharisticRevival.org/newsletter. Don’t add all those extra words I added earlier. We’ll make it simple for you. We are going to take a break here, but don’t go anywhere. We will be back after this.
In this episode of Roadmap to Heaven, host Adam Wright is joined by Sister Alicia Torres, a member of the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago. Sister Torres shares about an upcoming newsletter, the Heart of the Revival Newsletter by the National Eucharistic Revival.
Sister Torres explains the term Mystagogy, and the new series titled “Beautiful Light: A Paschal Mystagogy” which will explore the meaning and significance of the Eucharist. The series aims to align with the current Eucharistic Revival and highlight the Most Holy Eucharist.
She describes how each article in the series will invite readers to imagine a specific moment of the Mass, provide reflection questions, feature excerpts from the writings of the church fathers, and include practical catechesis by various writers. The aim is to creatively engage readers and deepen their awareness of the mysteries of the faith.
Sister Torres also expresses concern over the decrease in Catholic mass attendance and highlights the role of liturgical catechesis in deepening understanding and appreciation of the mysteries of the faith. She points out how the new series will draw from the mystical tradition to engage readers and encourage further exploration of the liturgy.
Lastly, Sister Torres discusses the charism of her religious community, the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago. She explains the Franciscans’ dedication to living the Gospel and serving the poor, rooted in their spirituality centered on Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. They engage in daily prayer routines, Mass celebrations, Eucharistic adoration, and scripture study. She also mentions their work with the poor in Chicago, evangelization through retreats, and their hope to establish perpetual adoration.
Overall, this episode of Roadmap to Heaven provides insight into Mystagogy, how the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago are participating in the revival, and how Catholics everywhere can get involved.
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