Cozzens: ‘The power of Christ’s light’

Catching up with Bishop Andrew Cozzens at the International Eucharistic Congress

As thousands of Catholics attend the Church’s International Eucharistic Congress in Quito, Ecuador, one bishop can’t seem to cross a room without being mobbed by pilgrims who want to take a photo, or have their rosaries blessed by him, or share with him some story of God working in their lives.

That prelate is Bishop Andrew Cozzens, of Crookston, Minnesota, who has been especially thronged by pilgrims since his Sept. 11 address at the congress, on the possibility of transforming sorrow and suffering in the mystery of the Eucharist.

Cozzens, who was organizer of this summer’s National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, Indiana, sat down with The Pillar to talk about the Congress, the Church, and the life of grace.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Bishop, you're here at the International Eucharistic Congress coming off of the National Eucharistic Congress. It's a congressional summer for you. 

What is your experience here?

It's been great. The advantage of this Congress is the international dimension and the chance to meet bishops from around the world, so that's been incredible. 

It's also very Latin American, which is very different for me. It has been a real encounter with the Latin American Catholic Church, which has different struggles and different strengths than we do.

Early in the Congress, bishops had the opportunity to visit parishes of the diocese, with each bishop assigned to a parish and invited to offer Mass there. Tell me about that.

That was incredible. That's certainly been the highlight for me, here, so far.

I went to a parish one hour south of the center of Quito, in a barrio, a neighborhood, that has 130,000 people in it, with one parish and two priests. 

They said they get about 7,000 people for Mass on Sundays, at their parish. 

I showed up on a Monday night, when they weren't supposed to have a normally scheduled Mass, and the church was wall-to-wall filled, and it was alive. The faith of the people was so moving. 

The music was vibrant, there was an offertory procession that went on and on. And then a full hour of dances and partying after the Mass.

It was a really beautiful evening, and I’m just so impressed by the faith of the people. 

It’s typical in Latino parishes, even in the United States, that when the bishop arrives, everybody wants your blessing and everybody wants a picture with you, but [at the parish], there was a kind of intensity to this that I had not experienced before. 

And I was thinking that those parishioners live in a kind of poverty that we don’t know, and their faith — and this opportunity to celebrate their faith — offers them a kind of joy that we also don't know.

The Mass lifts them out of their sufferings in various ways that we don’t understand, because we often find Mass boring. For them, I think it would be exactly the opposite: In a life filled with very concrete struggles, these moments of encounter with the Lord, and of experiencing joy, and celebrating together and lighting off fireworks together, maybe seem all the more real. 

There was a moment when I thought I was going to die, when they lit this cow on fire, and fireworks went everywhere.

[Editors’ note: In Ecuador, the “vaca loca” is a storied festival tradition, as seen in this video.]

It was also interesting because we had a time to encounter the parish council —the leaders of the parish — at a dinner afterwards. 

And some of them asked me questions that would have been asked by anyone in the parish council in the United States: What do we do with people who identify as gay in our parish? Or is it really possible to have a same-sex marriage? And what about the divorced people in our parish who feel alienated from the Church? 

We were able to have a conversation about those things. So it's interesting that the world is very different in certain ways, but also some of the same issues are affecting people here as are affecting the people in our parishes.

You gave a remarkable address here at the International Eucharistic Congress, focused on the redemption of suffering. What did you hope to convey?

I prayed a lot about this because I wanted to explain the power of the Eucharist, and I felt like the title given to me was an invitation to do that: “The Eucharist and the Transfiguration of the World.”

What I wanted to share was, frankly, rooted in Pope Francis. If you read his document on liturgy, Desiderio desideravi, it’s all about the Paschal Mystery. And of course, that’s the heart of our theology about the Eucharist.

I wanted to show the transformative power of the Paschal Mystery, because I do think that deeply affects fraternity, and the theme of this Eucharistic Congress is “Fraternity to heal the world.” 

Fraternity requires of each of us, if we're going to live it the way Jesus did, that we're willing to give our lives for others.

We have to learn the meaning of giving our lives, and what that is, and I think the Eucharist wants to teach us that. I was really honored that Cardinal Gambetti, at the morning Mass on the day of the talk,  went to the same theme: the surrender of self is the heart of the Christian life.

He then allowed me to expand on how that happens in the Eucharist.

There is a tension right now in discussions about pastoral theology — in conversations surrounding the synod on synodality, for example — about suffering.

Some say, as you said, that suffering is an opportunity for unity with Christ, while others tend to focus on calls to alleviate suffering, even if that requires more “flexible” moral norms. 

Were those things in mind as you spoke here? 

Definitely. 

There's certainly a tension in pastoral theology, about how to reach out to people, how to invite others in. 

I suppose you might say I fall on one side of that tension — in the sense of firmly believing in the power of grace to transform, and that all of our human actions have to be informed by and led by grace and by the Holy Spirit. 

Otherwise, the problems are just too big. 

I mean, we're here talking about “fraternity to heal the world.” 

But what do you do with the gangs in Venezuela, and here in Ecuador, who control large parts of Ecuador because of their drugs? How are we going to heal that? 

There’s no way, at all, except the Paschal Mystery, because the wounds are too deep, except for Jesus’ power. 

So I think that's where we have to be deeply rooted in Jesus’ power.

I tried to say in my talk that the people who are deeply rooted in living the Paschal Mystery are the ones who are the most expressive of compassion towards the sufferers. 

It’s Mother Teresa who goes around the world establishing convents to care for the suffering, because she so deeply lived that reality. I think that [Christ] is the only way to actually have the interior strength to live real suffering. It’s just too great of an obstacle, or it’s too great of a darkness to be overcome, except by the power of Christ’s light.

Bishop, I’ve been struck by the approach of this Congress, relative to the event in Indianapolis. 

This is a very different kind of event — While Masses and Holy Hours were central to the NEC, this International Eucharistic Congress has mostly been theological or catechetical talks, and then times when people share their own experiences of faith.

What is your assessment of this approach? 

You know, this is my first International Eucharistic Congress, and I read some of the history of congresses, and I think they actually started out this way. They tended to be more kind of academic, and for clerics and religious at first. They eventually began to expand and involve the laity in various kinds of ways. 

I think there are certainly moments of liturgy and devotion, and we'll have a big procession on Saturday, but it’s much more focused around the academic exploration of different aspects of a theme, whereas we tried to focus our congress, really, on evangelization.

I heard someone say that for this event, the “base document” is critically important for shaping the Congress, and I don’t think the NEC even had a base document!

No, we did not, and that might be because we didn't know what we were doing. And that might be a happy fault!

But I think part of the reason why you were invited here is because the whole world watched what happened in Indianapolis. 

How do you think that might echo through the Church in other parts of the world?

Indianapolis surprised all of us, including me, and it seemed like the Holy Spirit was doing something.

I think it’s possible that that could echo. 

The worst kept secret of this Congress is that the next International Eucharistic Congress is going to be in Sydney, Australia. I certainly know that the organizers from Sydney are very interested in learning from what we did in Indianapolis, and sort of merging that with what they're learning here in Quito. 

There was one thing that struck me here, and I don't know if this was necessarily the NEC’s impact, but the first day here, they had a very small chapel with a tabernacle in it, and then they realized that the people were lined up to get into this chapel, and so they eventually moved the chapel to a much larger space with adoration. 

And I think that's the impact of the Eucharistic Revival, and not just ours, but across the world. It’s saying that at a congress like this, we're not just here for academic talks. We actually want to spend time with the Lord.

We started from the beginning of our congress saying we wanted something more like World Youth Day than a convocation for leaders. The USCCB had done a convocation for leaders, it was great. And we did the XVI Encuentro, and that was great, but we wanted something more like World Youth Day. Here in Quito, on that spectrum, this event is more towards a convocation for leaders than like World Youth Day. 

And so, you do wonder if the church could learn that these congresses could be more like World Youth Day. We saw in Indianapolis that people desire that so much.

Here in Quito, you’re speaking a lot of Spanish.

Do you think you've spoken more Spanish in the past week than you do in Crookston, Minnesota in a year?

Absolutely. Absolutely. 

We have one Spanish Mass every other Sunday in Crookston. And actually my priest who says those Spanish Masses got deported, because of the problems you've detailed with immigration, and so, we've been covering that. 

In fact,  I cover it basically once a month until he can come back, because he has to be out of the country for a year.

But everywhere in our country, Latinos are often are in margins, so even in the city of Crookston itself, where we have Spanish Mass every other week, I think it's 25 to 30% of the kindergartners in our city are Spanish speaking, and Crookston is 80 miles south of Canada.

The presence of [Hispanic immigrants] in the U.S. is everywhere, and it's a blessing when we can embrace that everywhere, and if we don't embrace it, as we’ve learned, we lose people.