My Parish Dismantled My Faith as a Child; Laypeople Rebuilt It

The bishops began years of Eucharistic Revival (including the 2026 National Eucharistic Pilgrimage) after a poll several years ago suggested that only 31% of Catholics actually believe what the Church believes about the Eucharist.

The bishops were surprised the number was so low. I was impressed that the number was so high.

I am a member of the generation who went to religious education and Mass and never learned about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. For whatever reason decades of Catholics weren’t taught about the Eucharist — or brought to confession.

When I learned from classmates in college that Catholics believe that the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the body and blood of Christ, truly present in his body, blood, soul, and divinity, I didn’t believe them. I literally thought that I had stumbled into some kind of strange fringe Catholic group that believed crazy things no one else believed.

Not only had I never heard that — my religious education actively destroyed any impression I might have had that the Eucharist was important.

The first problem: I received communion at age 5, then my family moved to a new parish without much in terms of instruction.

I was the third child in three years in my family, after my brother and sister. My sister was a precocious, high-achieving child, and I think my mother expected me to be like her. I started playing the violin at age 4, though I never got very good at it. When my brother was ready for his First Communion, my mom did some quick calculating in her head. She was from Mexico, where First Holy Communion was a big deal, a day to celebrate with a big party. Our family was not well off, so my Mom worked through the comparison costs of three communion parties three years in a row vs. one party for three children, and had the brilliant idea that we would all receive our First Communion at once.

I confess I have no memory whatsoever of it. This doesn’t disqualify communion from being a meaningful experience for a child — after all, Eastern rite Christians receive communion at very young ages. But I think it only happens if there is robust follow-up to help the child know the meaning of the sacrament.

I didn’t receive that. Quite the contrary; we moved to a new parish in Tucson, Ariz., in the late 1970s, just as its pastor began to take down religious imagery and put images of saguaro cactuses and sunsets inside the church instead.

Then my religious ed. teacher did something terrible and destructive.

Since I had received my First Communion so young, my mother re-enrolled me in the First Communion program at our new parish. The program used the “We Gather” series of Catechetical materials which didn’t discuss the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Then my First Communion teacher did something that I think was well-intentioned but proved absolutely deadly to my young faith.

I really don’t remember anything of my instruction, but I vividly remember one session. Our teacher took us to the church, and the first thing that made it memorable is that we walked through the gate that separated the sanctuary, the area around the tabernacle, from the rest of the church. I had only seen the priest go in there, and so it felt like trespassing to pass the gate.

The second thing that is burned in my mind was when my teacher opened the tabernacle and had each of us feel inside. I didn’t want to but she encouraged me to do it. She told us, “See, there is nothing to be afraid of!”

I guess she expected it to be a moment of increased familiarity between us and the sacrament, but it wasn’t. I think she told us that the priest had removed the hosts, but it was a Wizard of Oz, “man behind the curtain” moment for me. My young brain had just learned that the sanctuary was not sacred ground after all and now, I learned there is nothing in the tabernacle. We are genuflecting to nothing.

Looking back on it, the incident reminds me of  James Clavell’s “The Children’s Story.”

His 1963 story is a parable about the Unted States being taken over by an unnamed but presumably communist nation. Students come to class to find a kind, friendly, attractive new teacher. She sweetly challenges their wish to say the Pledge of Allegiance and when one child fiercely insists that it is important to honor the flag, she agrees.

“I wish I could have a piece of it,” she says. “If it’s so important, I think we should all have a piece of it. Don’t you?” The children agree and so she cuts the flag into pieces and passes them out to the children.

This, of course, destroys the meaning of the flag and erases their allegiance to it rather than strengthening it. That was me and the Eucharist after my teacher pierced the mystery that the sanctuary and tabernacle protected. It’s no wonder that in the Old Testament, God heavily restricted the Holy of Holies — and Catholic canon law protects the tabernacle now. The mystery surrounding the Eucharist helps preserve our faith.

My faith took another hit because when I didn’t receive confession until years after my First Communion.

The Church requires first confession before first communion (see Catechism 1457) — but my 1970s parish didn’t.

For me, though, my first confession (which was also my last confession for many years) came when I was 8 — three years after my early First Communion, and a year after the First Communion of the classmates in my new parish.

If the message I took about the Eucharist from the tabernacle inspection was “no one is there,” the message I took about sin from the late confession was “no one cares.” God was not a loving, attentive Father who was interested in the details of my life because he wanted to be with me — he was a benignly distant uncle who shrugged off my worries about offending him.

This kind of situation is why St. John Paul II called the state of confession a “crisis” in the Church and used magisterial language in his 2003 encyclical to say:

“I therefore desire to reaffirm that in the Church there remains in force, now and in the future, the rule by which the Council of Trent … affirmed that, in order to receive the Eucharist in a worthy manner, ‘one must first confess one’s sins, when one is aware of mortal sin.’”

Bishops around the world followed suit. In 2006, the U.S. bishops published the document “On Preparing to Receive Christ Worthily in the Eucharist” and in 2007, the Latin American bishops followed with the Aparecida document prepared by the future Pope Francis (see No. 177).

All of it was way too late for me. But not for my children. We have always found a way for them to receive their sacramental preparation in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, which goes out of its way to link the first confession with first communion, dressing the newly reconciled first communicants in baptismal garments (see No. 17) to receive Our Lord.

In college, friends finally set me straight.

I ended up in a hardcore Catholic college program, practically by mistake, but once I was there, my new peers got me back to confession and did what my parish never did: They told me about the Real Presence.

“The host isn’t just a symbol of Jesus, you know. It’s really him,” they said.

At first I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I said, “You mean it shows that he is spiritually present?”

“No,” they said, “it is Jesus Christ. His real body is really here. It just looks like bread.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would Jesus want to do that?”

But I studied it — by which I mean I read Karl Keating and listened to a lot of Scott Hahn tapes, which is how we did that back in the day — and it changed my life.

Now, the Eucharist is the most important thing in my life.

I was put in charge of Eucharistic adoration at my university, and I have gone to Eucharistic Adoration weekly for years — sometimes daily, sometimes missing a week — but I have found that it’s practically a one-to-one ratio: The more time I spend in Eucharistic Adoration, the less anxiety I have in my life. The less time I spend in Eucharistic Adoration, the more anxiety I have in my life.

I like to compare it to the difference between being at home alone and being at home when someone else is in the house. As a kid (and as an adult too) if no one else is at home with you, the whole house feels different. And if someone is there, even if they are asleep in the other room, you can tell. In the same way, adoration makes my whole life feel different, because I know I’m not alone. Jesus Christ is present, and the future is 100% safe in his hands.

Adoration reminds me that no matter what, whether things are good or bad, he can handle it, and he will.

So with each of my children when they are little I have tried to teach them about the Real Presence.

Well, I try to teach them at every age, but when they are little I bring them to the tabernacle and we go through a question and answer session.

I ask, “What’s that called?”

They answer, “The tabernacle.”

“Who is in the tabernacle?”

Jesus.

“How can he fit in there if he’s a man like me?”

Because he’s God so he can do anything he wants.

“So what did he do?”

He turned bread into himself.

“Why would he do that?”

Because he loves us and he wants to be with us every day.

I hope they learn the lesson and that it changes their lives like it — eventually — changed mine.

More in the continuing series “How I Found My Faith”

By Tom Hoopes