Fr. Roger Landry: St. Peter Julian Eymard — Apostle of Eucharistic Revival for Every Age

This article originally appeared Aug. 2, 2022, at the Register.

Father Roger Landry, Catholic chaplain at Columbia University, is ecclesiastical assistant to Aid to the Church in Need USA. Father Landry, a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, has been appointed by the U.S. bishops a “National Eucharistic Preacher.”

Today, Aug. 2, the Church celebrates the feast of St. Peter Julian Eymard (1811-1868), whom later generations have rightly come to call the “Apostle of the Eucharist.” As the Church in the United States enters more deeply into its three-year Eucharistic Revival, we have much to learn from what God inspired him to do in post-Revolutionary France.

Eymard’s Eucharistic love began very young in a practicing Catholic home in the French Alps. One day when he was 5, his parents couldn’t find him and sent out his older sister Marianne to look for him. She found him in the church, where he had used a stool to climb up on the mensa of the high altar and was leaning his head upon the tabernacle door. When Marianne, astonished, asked what he was doing, with childlike simplicity he replied, “I am near Jesus and I am listening to him!” …..