By Cristina Cabrera Jarro -

MIAMI GARDENS | Don’t expect TikTok fun or sitcom comfort. It’s not about immediate gratification. And it’s more than “fine.” It’s “supernatural,” presenter Katie Prejean McGrady told about 145 high school students gathered in the chapel of St. Thomas University recently.

She was talking to them about eucharistic adoration, since the students, from local Catholic high schools, came to campus for a High School Eucharistic Revival, a local response to the national revival taking place throughout the U.S.

McGrady, a Catholic speaker, author and radio show host, and Father Rafael Capó, vice president of Mission at the archdiocesan university, took turns speaking to the students at the March 22, 2023, event which also included friendly games of competition. Archbishop Thomas Wenski celebrated the concluding Mass.

After asking the students, most of them involved in campus ministry at their schools, how many times they had gone to eucharistic adoration, McGrady answered, “I hope at least one or two times in your life.”

She described familiar scenes during adoration: people genuflecting, quiet prayers, some singing, perhaps some crying.

Sometimes, she said, “They’re having this intense moment, and you’re like, ‘This is nice. Nothing seems to be happening to me. Like, Jesus are you going to do anything?””

Some of the students giggled, others nodded.

McGrady told them that, as a teen, she experienced a faith crisis. It was 2005 and Hurricane Rita had ravaged her hometown in Louisiana. Her family had evacuated to a safe distance, at her grandparents’ home. But McGrady, 16 at the time, said she felt a deep, intense anger building up inside her. Her German grandmother – a convert to Catholicism – noticed, and immediately suggested they go to adoration. Early in the morning, they drove to a 24-hour chapel where her grandmother encouraged her to speak her heart.

“Jesus is a big boy; he can take it,” McGrady told the high school students. “Whatever it is that you want to say to him: I’m angry. I’m confused. I’m hurt. I’m happy. I’m joyful. I’m elated. I’m somewhere in between. I don’t know where to start. I scream all day long. Whatever you have to say to him, he can take it. Because when he gave us his body and blood, he didn’t do it for himself. He did it for you. He did it for us so that when we approached him to receive him, when we kneel to adore him, when we pass by a church, we remember that he is with us always until the end of the age.”

McGrady told the students to be wary of putting onto the Eucharist the same demands they make of a TikTok video to make them laugh, or a sitcom to comfort them. The emotional and spiritual good of adoration may not always be immediate; patience and persistence are key.

“It’s not going to be a good that you and I are going to immediately understand in a physical, tangible way in our lives because it cannot be explained by this world, or by the standards of this world. And your experience with the Eucharist is not going to be comparable to anything that you are going to experience in this life because it is truly supernatural, a moment of encounter with heaven itself,” McGrady said.

She also advised them not to go through life accepting the Eucharist as something simply “fine.”

“There’s a lot of things in the world that are ‘fine.’ Most of your life is ‘fine.’ But you weren’t made for ‘fine.’ You weren’t made to just be mediocre and comfortable. You are made for greatness. You are made for heaven. You are made for something so much different, and so much better than what the world has to offer you,” McGrady told them.

“We want to recapture the amazement that should be ours,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski told the students at the Mass that followed McGrady’s presentation. “We reflect on the fact on how God is so close to us, and so intimate with us that he permitted us to have Communion in his body and blood.”

Vicky Rivas, a senior from Archbishop Coleman Carroll High School in Miami, described the event as “a beautiful experience to see that no matter all of the crazy stuff happening in the world, there are people from different places coming together for one thing, and that one thing is God.”

Vicky also pointed out how the search for happiness is something that everyone desires, though sometimes people look in the wrong places.

“Some people just don’t know where to look for it, and they look for it in other things, and distractions. But there is nothing like the happiness that you get from the Church and from God,” Vicky said.

Launched in June 2022 on the feast of Corpus Christi, the three-year long National Eucharistic Revival will conclude with the 10th National Eucharistic Congress, set for July 2024 in Indianapolis, Indiana. A crowd of 80,000 Catholics from all over the U.S. are expected to fill Lucas Oil Football Stadium.

“And from that moment we will send out young people, lay leaders as missionaries of that message and that presence of Christ,” said Father Capó, who also has been designated a national eucharistic preacher for the revival.

While many anticipate that highlight of the revival, McGrady told the students that their gathering at St. Thomas to discuss why the Eucharist matters was just as important.

She said the world at this moment needs young people who will say, “I’m different because I know Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Not an idea, not a concept, not a theological point, but a person that I call to encounter.”

For more information on the National Eucharistic Revival, visit www.eucharisticrevival.org.