”Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, That my thoughts may all be holy.
Act in me, O Holy Spirit, That my work, too, may be holy.
Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, That I love but what is holy.
Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit, To defend all that is holy.
Guard me, then, O Holy Spirit, That I always may be holy.” St Augustine

‘The fruit of the spirit is Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, goodness, Faithfulness, gentleness and self -control ‘ ( Galatians 5:22-23)

I believe in the Holy Spirit. Not as a concept . I believe in the Holy Spirit in reality…. active in our lives even as you read this. If you have experienced the actual intervention of the Holy Spirit, as I have , you will know that the experience is not always a gentle ‘dove like ‘ encounter. The Apostles experienced the Holy Spirit’s revelation ”like the rush of a mighty wind” (Cor 2:2 ) . For me the revelation of the Spirit comes with a disturbing sense of unease , often a surprising sense that something is not quite right … something just feels out of place. As Pope Francis has said there is something of the ‘Odour of the Devil’ lingering . Almost as if the Holy Spirit was saying ” you need to take a look at this “

I have learned over the years to stop and listen when this happens because I know that ”When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak and will declare to you the things that are to come” (John16:13)

I have to admit however that despite my confidence in recognising when the Holy Spirit is active in my life revealing the Truth that John talks of I was shocked when the source of the ‘Odour of the Devil ‘ was the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) hosting of the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress as part of its three year-long Eucharistic Revival, meant to “restore devotion and understanding to this great mystery.” Why in God’s name would the Holy Spirit instill deep within me a sense of unease regarding an initiative whose mission statement is : ”To renew the Church by enkindling a living relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist”.

The project was prompted by a study conducted by the  Pew Research Center, in which only 31% of Catholics responded that they believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Ostensibly the multi million dollar event is aimed at restoring lay Catholics’ devotion to the Eucharist, and according to Bishop Andrew Cozzens the organisers are “hoping to have 80,000 to 100,000 people go to Indianapolis, July 17 to 21, 2024, a gathering of the American church. We want the whole church to be there. This idea that we would come together with our many cultures, with our many ages and generations, and that we would celebrate unity, we would experience a transforming encounter, and then we would be sent on mission—that’s going to be the focus of this event. We need to become like the early church and become missionaries again.”

So why the unease, why the sense that something is just not right, why the ‘odour of the Devil’.

It began with comment that Catholic Traditionalist and veteran Pope Francis critic Taylor Marshall made in relation to Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and the driving force behind the Eucharistic Revival project. Marshall said the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had let Barron in so they : ” …can use his persona and his reach and his platform to baptise their own agenda. “

When Pope Francis underwent colon surgery and said that : ” There were those who wanted me dead” he was widely understood to be referring to a small but powerful number of Bishops within the USCCBs ranks who had become increasingly vocal and vicious in their criticism of his Papacy. If they are using Bishop Barron to baptise their own agenda then you can guarantee that the main objective of the Eucharistic Revival is not : ”To renew the Church by enkindling a living relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist”. Their Mission statement should more accurately read ” To empower an elite group within the USCCB to seize control of the agenda of the Church , wipe away the current Popes reforms and any memory of him and return it to a pre Vatican 2 state controlled by an unassailable power hungry clerical elite ”

Bishop Barron may well be an unwitting accomplice in the real mission but the strings of his formidable media empire ( Word on Fire ) are already being pulled by those reeking of the ‘Odour of the Devil’ who are intent on making receipt of the Eucharist by the faithful “a prize for the perfect” in direct contradiction to Pope Francis.

According to Bishop Barron:

”The Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, its the centre..the beginning and the end of Christian life…its the real presence of Jesus Body Blood Soul and Divinity… there is nothing more important .. there is nothing more important than the Eucharist”

The problem is, according to the Pew Research Centre , ”nearly’ seven-in-ten Catholics (69%) say they personally believe that during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine used in Communion “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” Just one-third of U.S. Catholics (31%) say they believe that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.”

This means that 69% of Catholics in the survey don’t agree with Bishop Barron that the Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus Body Blood Soul and Divinity. I agree with the 69%. I believe that the Eucharist is a beautiful gift from my Saviour, ”a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”, the means by which I am able to come together to share a sacred meal with my Brothers and Sisters , regardless if they are perfect or not. The Eucharist is sacred to me not because it is the real flesh and blood of my Saviour Jesus Christ but because at the Last Supper Jesus asked me to take part in this sacred meal in memory of Him and in doing so He gave me the greatest gift of all, He gave me the Mass. It does not matter if I am part of the 31% of Catholics who believe that the Eucharist is the ”the real presence of Jesus Body Blood Soul and Divinity…” or I am one of the 69% who dont believe that the Eucharist actually becomes the body and blood of Christ . What matters is that when we attend mass together we are in the ”real presence of Jesus Body Blood Soul and Divinity” as soon as we walk through the door : ”For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Matthew 18:20. If at Mass we partake of this sacred meal or not, believing in Transubstantiation or not Jesus is still in our midst, in communion with the faithful gathered together , comforting us, healing us, nourishing us , allowing us to experience His Love, Peace and Joy , a lived experience of Heaven on Earth in His Divine presence.

I believe Bishop Barron, though well meaning, is mistaken when he says that ”The Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, its the centre..the beginning and the end of Christian life”

The source and summit of Christian life, its centre…the beginning and the end of Christian life is not the Eucharist …. It is …………………… Love.

” if Holy Scripture proclaims that God is love, and that love is of God, and works this in us that we abide in God and He in us, and that hereby we know this, because He has given us of His Spirit, then the Spirit Himself is God, who is love. Next, if there be among the gifts of God none greater than love, and there” is no greater gift of God than the Holy Spirit, what follows more naturally than that He is Himself love, who is called both God and of God? And if the love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, ineffably demonstrates the communion of both, what is more suitable than that He should be specially called love, who is the Spirit common to both? For this is the sounder thing both to believe and to understand, that the Holy Spirit is not alone love in that Trinity, yet is not specially called love to no purpose.” (St Augustine)

The ‘odour of the devil’ permeates the Eucharistic Revival because it will weaponise the Eucharist to exclude those deemed by a clerical elite to be ‘unworthy’ of receiving it. Bishop Andrew Cozzens tells us that ” missionary conversion is what we’re seeking through the eucharistic revival. The last year [of the revival], we want to just help facilitate that. We want to give lots of resources to people to help teach them how to be missionaries in their daily life as they experience this fire. “this encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist” will move Catholics who have been part of this experience to be missionary disciples who would in turn lead others to the faith.”

And who is this ‘missionary conversion ‘ aimed at if not the 69% of Catholics who do not believe in Transubstantiation. What happens to those who, despite the fire of Bishop Barrons formidable media empire and the likes of EWTN and the influence of various Hollywood mega stars, nevertheless remain steadfast in their faithful respect of the Eucharist as symbolic rather than Transubstantive. What is to be done with the 69% of Catholics who refuse to be consumed by this missionary zeal, who receive the Eucharist in good faith but are considered by the missionaries to continue to receive the Eucharist ‘unworthily’ because they do not believe they are receiving the actual flesh and blood of Christ. This is where the ‘Odour of the Devil’ becomes pretty overwhelming. This is when the clerical elite who have defined that the only way to receive the Eucharist ‘worthily’ is to do so in the belief that the Eucharist is the real flesh and blood of Christ start to decide who can and who cannot take part in this sacred meal and ultimately who is allowed at Mass.

If, through the eye watering resources and finances pouring into the Eucharistic Revival a small number of Clerics are allowed to weaponise the Eucharist and they decide who of the faithful are properly disposed to receive the Eucharist then all of Pope Francis’s efforts to combat clericalism will have been to no avail. Much of his Papacy has been dedicated to addressing Clericalism. He has said that:

” Clericalism is a whip, it is a scourge, it is a form of wordliness that defiles and damages the face of the Lord’s bride….it enslaves God’s holy and faithful people”

and described the faithful people of God as “patiently and humbly enduring the scorn, mistreatment, and marginalization of institutionalized clericalism.”

Given the world wide clerical abuse horrors that engulfed and almost destroyed our Catholic Communion there is grave danger in enabling clerics to establish any foundation of unassailable power within Mother Church. For those small but powerful group of clerics in the USCCB the route to unassailable power lies in The Eucharistic Revival . If we allow them to define the nature of the Eucharist and who and who is not worthy to receive it ; if we capitulate to their tyrannical rule and insistence on subservience to them we are complicit in all of the horrors that will ensue as a result.

This is why the so called Eucharistic revival is so dangerous. Let us be Truthful here. We must be honest . The multi million dollar extravaganza of the so called Eucharistic revival is not a mission to celebrate the wonder and centrality of the Eucharist at the Heart of the Catholic faith . It is a synically calculated plan to weaponise the sacrament and tear apart the reforms of Pope Francis in order to re assert the power and centrality of elite and exclusive clericalism within the Catholic Church. It is not the Sacrament that those manipulating Bishop Barron’s deep faith and the Eucharistic revival seek to exalt it is the unassailable elitism of those who perform the Sacrament… it is themselves . Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen, Germany once said :

“Sexual abuse has only one origin, [and it is] in the wrong use of power in our church,”

The logic of those weaponising the Holy Eucharist is painfully simple . If you exalt the Eucharist above all else , even above Love , and only clerics can define the nature of our sacramental participation then their elite and privileged power base becomes unassailable. Empowering an elite hungry for power and unaccountable hierarchy would plunge Catholicism back into the horror of the darkest days of our Faith when the power base of Clericalism was so unassailable and unaccountable that a sinister minority of global predatory clerics felt it their privilege to sexually prey upon children at will and in doing so almost cast Mother Church into the Fires of Hell.

“Just as the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees became fossilised into an unbending set of codes that oppressed the people, so within the Church has the ascendancy of clergy over laity hardened into a separation of roles which has too often manifested itself as a tyranny” ( , Catholic Scholar , Cecilia A. Hatt , August 20, 2022)

In the Eucharist, the Pope said, “everyone can experience this loving and concrete attention of the Lord.”

Those manipulating Bishop Barron and the Eucharistic Revival would make our Church a fortress to repel those who most need her Love and protection. In their control the Eucharist would only be allowed for those that they , not Christ , deem worthy to receive it. They would make the Church into what Pope Francis warned against ”a bureaucratic customs house, constantly inspecting and questioning, hindering the working of the Holy Spirit and the growth of God’s people.” To consolidate their power and control all masses would soon revert to Latin contrary to the guidance of Vatican 2 and in direct contradiction of Pope Francis’ Divinely guided instructions. Then they will come for the LGTBQ+ community, those who are divorced and remarried, the 69% of Catholics who do not agree with their interpretation of the nature of the Eucharist would soon find themselves excluded. Catholics across the world would be forced to kneel not before the Eucharist, but in powerless subservience to their elite self promoting institutional power, that very same institutional power that plunged the Church into a child sexual abuse abyss from which it still has not fully emerged. They will purge the Church of anyone who does not capitulate to what they dictate. Theirs will be a much smaller, hollow and Christless Church but that will not matter because they will be the powerful unassailable elite that they long to be. God help their flock if we stand by and let this happen.

So I appeal to my Brother, Bishop Robert Barron, in the name of the Holy Spirit, to seize the Eucharistic Revival back from that small group who reek of the‘ Odour of the Devil’ in the USCCB , from those who would weaponise the Eucharist and to wrestle control from those who seek: ” To empower an elite group within the USCCB to seize control of the agenda of the Church , wipe away the current Popes reforms and any memory of him and return it to a pre Vatican 2 halcyon state controlled by an unassailable power hungry clerical elite ” I appeal to him in the name of the Holy Spirit to make the missionary goal of those he ‘sets on fire’ to be about offering the World an encounter with the living Christ through Love and not a debate about the nature of the sacred meal that Christ has gifted his beloved Church. I appeal to him to acknowledge the guidance of the Holy Spirit that ”a loving relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist” is a reality if you believe in transubstantiation or not . I ask him to announce and proclaim throughout his formidable empire that all are welcome to receive the Love of God during the sacred communion of mass when Christ Himself is in our midst regardless of how they perceive the constitution of the Eucharist. I appeal to him to proclaim that ”Love is the source and summit of Christian life, its the centre..the beginning and the end of Christian life”

Most importantly of all I appeal to all of my Brothers and Sisters in Christ to wake up and to recognise the ‘Odour of the Devil’ permeating the so called American Eucharistic Revival. Be attentive to the intervention of the Holy Spirit calling you to take an active role in combatting the scourge of those seeking to weaponise the Eucharist and those who demand that you kneel before them and not God. Join Pope Francis in combatting the scourge of Clericalism. Please share this post with your family and friends

If you would like to be kept in touch with this issue please e mail me and I will make sure you receive updates. My e mail is thelaypope@yahoo.com

God Bless you and yours

Peace and Love