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CV NEWS FEED // The four-foot-tall ornate monstrance used to expose the Eucharist at the National Eucharistic Congress last week reportedly has a little-known origin story rooted in Mexico and another Eucharistic procession that occurred in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 2023.
According to Angelus News, the Archdiocese’s newspaper, the organizers of the Congress originally saw Archbishop José Gomez use the same model of the 20-pound monstrance during a March 2023 Eucharistic procession in San Gabriel, California.
When the organizers decided that the Congress should use a replica of the archdiocesan monstrance, they were directed to Fr. Miguel Angel Ruiz, a Los Angeles priest with roots in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Fr. Ruiz said he owns the same monstrance, which was the exact one he used to pray before at a convent in Guadalajara that he often visited as a seminarian. When he was ordained a priest in 2019, the sisters at the convent bought the monstrance and gifted it to him.
The monstrance was made by a liturgical store in Guadalajara, to which Fr. Ruiz directed the organizers to order a replica.
Angelus News reported that the monstrance was rush-ordered, as Pope Francis had agreed to bless it at the Vatican only a few weeks later.
From Guadalajara to Tijuana, then to San Diego and Washington, D.C., the monstrance made it in time and headed across the Atlantic Ocean in June 2023 with Bishop Cozzens and a Congress delegation to meet the pope for his blessing.
When Bishop Cozzens prayed before the Eucharist in front of thousands in Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium on the opening night of the Congress, he quoted an exhortation given to the organizers by Pope Francis the same day he blessed the monstrance.
“In the Eucharist, we encounter the one who gave everything for us, Who sacrificed Himself in order to give us life, who loved us to the end,” Pope Francis said at the time. “We become credible witnesses to the joy and transforming beauty of the gospel, only when we recognize that the love we celebrate in this Sacrament cannot be kept to ourselves but demands to be shared with all.”
