Gulf Pine Catholic

Gulf Pine Catholic • July 5, 2024 13 ‘Jesus cannot help but pour himself out’ on National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, pilgrim says BY MARIAWIERING OSV News ATLANTA ( OSV News ) -- Shayla Elm has gathered a trove of memories from her first five weeks along the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage’s south- ern route. Over a week in Louisiana alone, she and seven other “per- petual pilgrims” traveling the full 1,900-mile St. Juan Diego Route processed with the monstrance on a fire truck in Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux; stopped a train as a stream of Catholics crossed railroad tracks during a procession in the Diocese of Baton Rouge; and, in New Orleans, emerged in a post-Mass procession from St. Louis Cathedral to an unexpectedly quiet French Quarter, their hymns filling a space best known for jazz. But one moment from weeks ago in Sugar Land, Texas, still stands out in her mind: During Eucharistic adoration at a parish, a group of priests and deacons were processing around the church with the Eucharist when a little girl broke away from her family and ran up to a deacon. She pointed to the monstrance. “What is that?” Elm recalled her asking. “That’s Jesus,” the deacon said. “And so she goes to the monstrance, she kisses her little hand, and she touches the bottom of the monstrance and then runs away,” Elm said. “And it was this moment in my own interior where I was aware of, like, ‘I’m that little girl right there.’ … I just started weeping. Because that’s what we’re called to be: where we are the children of God.” Elm, 25, said her own deepening love of the Eucharist compelled her to take an interest last year in the National Eucharistic Revival and ultimately apply to be -- and be chosen as -- one of 30 perpet- ual pilgrims walking the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage’s four routes. “This entire pilgrimage, for me, has just been calling us to be childlike, to be small, to be little and just like that little girl, to have that simple faith,” she said. Along the way, the moment reminds her, she said, “to just give Jesus these ‘little kisses’ -- to do little things for the Lord and for the people that we meet, to do things for them.” Elm shared her experience of the ongoing pil- grimage June 20 with Catholic journalists and com- munications professionals gathered in Atlanta for the Catholic Media Conference, an annual gathering of the Catholic Media Association. The Juan Diego Route pilgrims will spend the June 21-23 weekend in Atlanta after leaving Brownsville, Texas, May 19 and traveling east through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. They will continue through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, arriving in Indianapolis for the National Eucharistic Congress July 17-21. There they will converge with the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage’s other three routes: the western St. Junipero Serra Route, whose pilgrims began in California and spent the week of June 16 crossing Nebraska; the eastern St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Route, whose pilgrims began in Connecticut and recently left western Pennsylvania for northern West Virginia; and the northern Marian Route, whose pilgrims began in Minnesota and are in east- ern Wisconsin. Each day, the perpetual pilgrims stop at parishes, Catholic institutions or secular sites for Mass, Eucharistic processions and other worship. Their continuous companion is the Eucharist, carried in a specially designed monstrance or reserved in a spe- cial tabernacle in their support van. Elm grew up in Minot, North Dakota, and works in Denver for Christ in the City , an outreach to homeless men and women. She joked about being a “North Dakota girl” sent to walk in the Texas heat, where temperatures during their first week hovered around 100 degrees. They began their journey in the Diocese of Brownsville on Pentecost Sunday, where Catholics called out “Viva, Cristo Rey!” -- long live Christ the King. “It’s so beautiful to be like one of the Apostles -- to receive the Spirit and to be sent out,” she said. Elm said that walking in this unprecedented pilgrimage was “something ordained in my heart for a while.” Last year, she had planned to walk the Camino de Santiago -- a major pilgrimage route in Spain culminating at the tomb of St. James -- and had requested the time off for June 2024. “Then when I heard this pil- grimage come up, I was like, ‘Woah, that’s the American Camino.’ I thought, ‘I have to do this. I have to be part of this,’” she said. “The Eucharist has been just the center of my life for my whole life, but I think especially in my college years” while she was studying com- munication at University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. Elm grew up Catholic and received good cat- echesis, she said, “but I didn’t necessarily have that personal relationship with Jesus, and in college that was really fostered in some deep moments of suffer- ing. … It was either, ‘I believe or I don’t,’ and that meant ‘everything.’ So I either believe that the Eucharist is really Jesus’ real presence -- His real Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity -- or I don’t. And I can’t be lukewarm about it, because that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed to be all in about it.” “Since then, I’ve decided to be all in, and Jesus has just shown up for me in a very real way,” she said. In receiving Jesus’ “tender invitation” to be a perpetual pilgrim, Elm hopes she can help others truly meet Him in the Eucharist. While their journey has taken them to downtown cathedrals and parish neighborhoods, they also have walked in places of suffering, visible and hidden. The first few days of their journey, they walked along the U.S.-Mexico border wall. In Corpus Christi, a Eucharistic proces- sion of 1,000 people stopped to pray at a prison. In the Diocese of Victoria, they visited Presidio La Bahia, a Spanish frontier fort that was the site of a famous massacre during the Texas Revolution. SEE NEC24 NEP ROUNDUP WEEKS, PAGE 19 Shayla Elm, a perpetual pilgrim who is on the Juan Diego Route of the National Eu- charistic Pilgrimage, speaks June 20 during the Catholic Media Conference in Atlanta. OSV News photo/Bob Roller