By Maria Wiering, OSV News
ST. PAUL, Minn. (OSV News) — On May 18, Pope Leo XIV will be inaugurated into his Petrine ministry at St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. Hours later, on a different continent, a Mass in Indianapolis will launch the 2025 National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, a five-week journey across 10 states to Los Angeles.
“I don’t actually know if I believe in coincidences, and surely there will be fruit of that in the future, but it will be right on time,” said Frances Webber, one of the eight “perpetual pilgrims,” speaking about the aligned date of these key Masses.
“We don’t know what the fullness of the fruit of the pilgrimage will be or Pope Leo’s papacy,” she said. “The beauty of the Lord and the beauty of the church is that it’s always unfolding in new ways.”
Webber even sees a personal connection: Pope Leo XIV was elected on her 22nd birthday May 8, and his chosen link to Pope Leo XIII, known for his attention to the church’s social teaching at the end of the 19th century, shows he cares about aspects of the church that are also close to her heart.
Webber was born and raised in Virginia and spent a year working at a Colorado ski resort before moving to Minnesota to study theology at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic university based in St. Paul. Now completing her degree online through St. Joseph’s College of Maine, she said the strong ties she formed with St. Paul’s Outreach, or SPO, a campus evangelization ministry, kept her in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where she lives in an intentional household of women linked to the organization.
Meanwhile, she connected with a Catholic Worker house in Minneapolis and worked alongside one of its leaders as he launched the Center for Catholic Social Thought at a parish in downtown St. Paul.
At first, Webber grappled with how to personally unify these two worlds, SPO’s charismatic and college-oriented life and the Catholic Workers’ selfless focus on the poor. Eventually it clicked.
“For a long time, I struggled to marry the two. They’re both sides within the same church and exist in the same reality, but they’re kind of really, radically different,” she said.
It was the witness of a family close to SPO who strives for solidarity with people who are struggling that helped her see the different apostolates are “actually the same reality being lived out in different ways,” she said, especially with their shared focus on communal living, prayer and worship.
Webber expects that realization to influence her journey as a perpetual pilgrim, where she will be meeting new people daily with the aim of sharing the Gospel and Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist, while building community among her fellow pilgrims.
“The beauty of the universality of the church is that all of these things come together,” she said. “The ways that we go about doing mission work on St. Thomas’ campus, like meeting with students, is not super different than doing street ministry with the pilgrims in Indianapolis. I’m still going up to somebody I don’t know, who may or may not know the Gospel. I don’t know what their story is. I don’t know what their background is. And asking, ‘How can I pray for you?’ You’re honoring them as a human being first and not as an object to evangelize.”
“Like, a human being is a human being,” she added, “and we don’t know their story until they know their story, and so we meet them all in the same way.”
On May 14, Webber and a friend were going to begin driving a van retrofitted for last year’s Eucharistic pilgrimage from Minnesota to Indianapolis ahead of the pilgrimage’s May 18 opening Mass of thanksgiving.
The Mass is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. EDT at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in downtown Indianapolis — the same church where pilgrims on last year’s four routes met as they arrived in the city last year — and is expected to be celebrated by Indianapolis Archbishop Charles C. Thompson.
This year’s 3,300-mile Drexel Route — named for American-born St. Katharine Drexel — will travel from Indianapolis through 20 dioceses and four Eastern Catholic eparchies across Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
The pilgrims’ schedule includes daily stops for Mass, Eucharistic adoration, worship and fellowship at parishes, shrines and Catholic institutions along the way. The full schedule of events and registration can be found at www.eucharisticpilgrimage.org.
Webber hopes the fresh worldwide attention to the Catholic Church, from Pope Francis’ death to Pope Leo XIV’s first weeks of papal ministry, might open more hearts to the Eucharist as the pilgrims make their way through America’s heartland and the Southwest.
It helps, of course, to have the surprise of an American pope — one who praised the National Eucharistic Congress as “a magnificent experience” after watching it online, when speaking at a Catholic parish in Illinois in August.
The widespread attention to and interest in the Catholic Church “might make people more open,” said Webber, herself a convert to the Catholic faith.
“I’ve seen it even in my own relationships with my family. I’ve seen it with people on campus at St. Thomas who are not Catholic,” she said. “It’s giving a particular openness to what is happening in the life of the church right now. More than ever, the church has been in the light of culture. … There’s a desire to know about the realities of the faith, and I think the pilgrimage makes it incredibly accessible to people.”
While the July 17-21 congress was the destination of last year’s four-route pilgrimage, which launched with a total of 30 pilgrims from points in Minnesota, California, Connecticut and Texas, this year’s single-route pilgrimage will end in a city still recovering — and suffering — from the January wildfires that ravaged major areas, took 30 lives and displaced thousands of households.
The pilgrims hope to walk with people directly affected by those fires, particularly on a private pilgrimage with the Eucharist the pilgrimage’s organizers said in April that they had been working to arrange. The pilgrimage will culminate June 22 on the solemnity of Corpus Christi with a Mass, procession and Eucharistic festival.
Webber encountered the pilgrimage last year when she joined part of a five-mile, Memorial Day procession in St. Paul from the St. Paul Seminary down a leafy, Victorian-mansion-lined avenue to the Cathedral of St. Paul. That procession drew an estimated 7,000 people, and may have been the pilgrimage’s largest turnout prior to the congress, which organizers estimate brought more than 60,000 people to Lucas Oil Stadium and the adjacent Indiana Conference Center.
And while Webber also attended the congress, which on its opening night included the pilgrims’ final procession to a central altar, it is an unexpected encounter with the pilgrims in St. Paul that sticks in her mind. The day after the massive procession, she was driving to work in downtown St. Paul and she witnessed the pilgrims making a small, simple procession with the Eucharist along the skyscraper-flanked sidewalks.
“I stop at a stoplight and just look up and there the Eucharist is just like crossing the street in the middle of downtown St. Paul,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s awesome.'”
They pilgrims were walking near a Church of Scientology building, and Webber noted the contrast.
“I was just really struck by the witness to something that is so secular, for lack of a better word, to bring the Eucharist directly next to it, and the way that people stopped around it,” she said. “I don’t know any of the people who encountered the Eucharist that day, beyond the pilgrims. But you could tell that there was something there, and that people knew there was something happening.”
In her free time, Webber has dedicated herself to making food like sourdough bread and kombucha that take time to ferment, and she sees a parallel in her expectations for the pilgrimage and ultimately, the U.S. bishops’ three-year National Eucharistic Revival that supported it.
She pointed to the 1941 National Eucharistic Congress, which was the last national Eucharistic congress in the U.S. prior to last year’s, making for an 83-year gap. (A gap punctuated, albeit, by the 1976 International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia.) The 1941 congress was held in St. Paul, which she recognizes as the see city of an archdiocese that has borne creative and influential ministries and offers widespread opportunities for Eucharistic adoration.
“I have never seen Eucharistic adoration as accessible as it is here” in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, she said, which she attributes, at least in part, to the 1941 congress. “It will probably take 50 years to see the fruit of what happened in Indianapolis … and even to see the fruit of the pilgrimage. I think it’s a slow burn.”
Webber’s personal expectations for the pilgrimage include leading worship and praying with others. Beyond that, she is willing to let the experience unfold in the way other events and efforts before it have, or will.
“It’s easy to speculate about what we think the Lord is going to do with something, and I think that puts the Lord in a box,” she said. “And I’m just like, this is probably the most radical ‘yes’ of my life thus far, and could be the most radical ‘yes’ of my life for the rest of my life. I think it would be crazy of me to try to put the Lord in a box for it, and try to define what I want him to do in my life.”
