‘If one person returns’ — Sydney archbishop plans for 2028 Eucharistic congress

Archbishop Anthony Fisher hopes to evangelize Australia with international gathering.

As the International Eucharistic Congress drew to a conclusion on Sunday, Vatican officials announced that the next International Congress will be held in Sydney, Australia, in just four years — 2028.

Ahead of that announcement, The Pillar sat down with Sydney’s Archbishop Anthony Fisher to talk about what he hopes the 2028 event will be, how it can evangelize, and why Americans should start planning to coming to Australia.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Archbishop Anthony Fisher. Credit: Archdiocese of Syndey.

Archbishop, it has now been announced that you will be the host for the next International Eucharistic Congress.

Having experienced the beginning of this year’s event, tell me what you think will be unique about Sydney's approach to the International Eucharistic Congress.

For us, the principal goal will be to bring people back to Mass and to a greater, deeper love of the Eucharist. 

It may well be in a place like Ecuador that most people practice [the faith] — we're in a very different culture. 

But we're down in Australia now to well fewer than one in 10 Catholics coming to Mass. We're doing better in Sydney, but it's still not great.

So a big part of it for us is this: What can we do to really help people to encounter Christ in the Eucharist, to discover what a treasure it is, how much it matters to their lives, what it can do for their lives? 

Our years of preparation for us will be very much focused on that.

I think too, we'll have particular Aussie elements to bring to this. We have a very beautiful city to use as a backdrop for it, as we did for World Youth Day 20 years before. We have various youth movements, and Aboriginal groups, and other parish groups, which I think will contribute their own particular flavor.

That sounds very attractive. But much of the Eucharistic Congress is the sort of thing usually attended by those who already practice the faith, no?

It would be almost an inversion of the ordinary Eucharistic Congress model if it were  something going out, an evangelical project.

Well, I see this as at least a 10-year long program, not just an event. The three years of preparation are three years of evangelization and catechesis around the Eucharist. And there's the week of events itself. Then then there will be a long period afterwards of follow-up to really reap the fruits of that.

I mean, the events have a power of their own. There's no doubt. People, sometimes, are drawn along. They don't even know why they're there. Something wonderful happens for them there. That's God's grace at work. But we can cooperate with that grace by really preparing well and doing good follow up afterwards. And so I see this as at least a 10 or 15-year long pastoral project.

Australian pilgrims at the 2024 International Eucharistic Congress. Credit: Archdiocese of Sydney.

Ahead of the U.S. National Eucharistic Congress, the pilgrimages and processions which preceded the actual Congress seemed to have a strong “new evangelization” element. 

People who didn’t practice the faith, or maybe had a very latent sense of Catholicism, had something awakened or sparked by that. And the same thing is true about the extraordinary Eucharistic procession here in Quito.

Do you think that will translate to Australian culture?

I think it will. 

We have a Corpus Christi procession in Sydney, and it's been growing year by year the last few years. We had 15,000 this past Corpus Christi. I would guess by next year, we'll have 20,000 and so on. It will keep growing.

And interestingly, some of the people that come along to that are not very regular at church, but they're happy to come out at least from time to time about their faith publicly. 

And I think it's very good for Catholics to be challenged to be a bit more public about their faith.

If the aim of the International Eucharistic Congress in Sydney is to return people to the faith, is there a place for pilgrims from other parts of the world? 

Should Americans come? Can we envision ourselves helping you with that project in some way?

It really would be hugely helpful to us to have Americans come, particularly with the experience they've just had of the Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. Because it's been 100 years since we last had an International Congress in Sydney.

For a group like the Americans who've had it very recently in their national forum, they can come with that experience and enthusiasm about the Eucharist, that excitement and that willingness to celebrate that publicly. It’ll help us a lot in Australia if people come with that excitement about Christ and Eucharist.

I think too, it adds to the festival around the Eucharistic Congress if you have the flags and the colors of the costumes and the different accents. And it's a bit like what World Youth Day brings by having lots of nations there, not just the host nation. We want that for our International Eucharistic Congress.

Look, if one person returns to regular practice of the faith, returns to the Eucharistic Lord and discovers what he has for them, that is a wonderful thing. If a thousand do, if a million do... I can't see why we should aspire to less than a million coming back to Mass in Australia. 

So if we can, 10 years on, say we've done that, well then, we look at what do we do beyond that? In my own city, there are 5 or 6 million people. That's 5 or 6 million potential saints. And we've got to do a lot more. We're doing a lot of good things already, but we've got to do a lot more to work with God to make those 5 or 6 million saints.

The liturgies at the National Eucharistic Congress created a template, I think, for what liturgy can look like that are really drawn from what Sacrosanctum concilium says they should be. 

And many people have said that the Indianapolis Eucharistic Congress was powerful precisely because it was liturgical before anything else — the primary focus is the worship of God. 

Have you started giving thought to the liturgies at the Eucharistic Congress in Sydney?

We have started thinking about it. One thing we have in Sydney, like some of the big cities in the United States,is that we have many of the rites of the Church alive and well. Not just the Latin Rite in its two forms, or one or two ethnic groups - we've got most of the different liturgical rites of the Church. 

So one possibility would be to see how we can work with east and west, with both lungs, to show the beauty of the liturgy in the different traditions in the Catholic Church.

Any possibility we'll get to see the Dominican Rite?

Of course. Yes, there are those who celebrate the Dominican Rite already, and I'm sure they'll do that with great enthusiasm during the Eucharistic Congress.