National pilgrimage carries the Eucharist to Midwest cathedrals and along cow fields

The 67 victims of the Jan. 29 air collision in Washington were remembered at a May 28 Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita, Kansas, celebrated by Bishop Carl A. Kemme. The American Airlines-operated flight that collided with a U.S. Army helicopter over the Potomac River had originated in Wichita.

The Mass was part of the 2025 National Eucharistic Pilgrimage that on May 28 marked its 10th day and events in its eighth diocese. Its eight young adult “perpetual pilgrims” left Indianapolis May 18 accompanied by chaplains and the Eucharist, with plans to reach Los Angeles for the feast of Corpus Christi, June 22.

The pilgrims’ 10-state route includes daily stops at parishes and other Catholic institutions for Mass, Eucharistic adoration, service and fellowship.

In his May 28 homily, Bishop Kemme preached about the importance of Eucharistic processions bearing witness to Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist.

“Who we carry into the streets today is none other than Jesus himself,” he said. “It is one thing to believe this and keep this mystery contained within the four walls of our churches, but it is quite another to bring this mystery out into the streets for the entire world to see.”

He continued: “The Eucharist is not my private procession or yours. It belongs to all of us, and it belongs to the entire world, even a world that looks upon it sometimes with disdain or perhaps irritation, or, at worst, disbelief.”

While at the Wichita cathedral, pilgrims visited the tomb of Venerable Emil Kapaun, a U.S. Army chaplain during World War II and the Korean War, who died in 1951 at age 35 while ministering to other prisoners of war in a North Korean prison camp. Pope Francis named the priest, whose cause for canonization is underway, “venerable” in February.

Later that day, the pilgrims spent time with guests at The Lord’s Diner, a soup kitchen across from the cathedral, before joining a Eucharistic healing event inside the cathedral. Ace Acuña, a perpetual pilgrim who works in campus ministry at Princeton University in New Jersey, was struck by the faith he saw among those gathered, some of whom recalled the hemorrhaging woman in the Gospel who touched Jesus’ cloak to be healed.

As a priest carried a monstrance holding the Eucharist around the church, “one man even partially climbed over a pew just to be able to touch the (priest’s humeral) veil, as he whispered to himself, ‘Just the tassel,'” Acuña wrote in a reflection on the pilgrimage’s live blog at OSVNews.com.

The pilgrims began the second week of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage in the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, where they led a 6-mile procession May 24 between two rural, historic Iowa churches, St. Boniface in New Vienna and Sts. Peter and Paul in Petersburg.

“For two-and-a-half hours, we prayed, sang and silently followed Jesus along the scenic country roads connecting the two parishes. The quiet beauty of it all was captivating,” Acuña wrote in another post.

The day before, the pilgrims had arrived with the Blessed Sacrament in the Dubuque Archdiocese by boat, while listening to a reading from Venerable Samuel Mazzuchelli, a Dominican priest who established parishes along the Mississippi River from the 1830s to the 1850s. The text recalled another boat ride, where the boat began to sink, but Father Mazzuchelli had the Eucharist with him and trusted God to save him and his companions.

“Just hearing about his faith and his trust in God to save them in that moment … to be on a boat in that moment, to be staring at our Lord (in the monstrance) in this beautiful moment of encounter” was a poignant experience for Cheyenne Johnson, a perpetual pilgrim and the director of Catholic campus ministry at Butler University in Indianapolis, who described the boat ride in a May 28 press conference.

After attending events in several parishes and a priestly ordination at the Cathedral of St. Raphael in downtown Dubuque, the perpetual pilgrims and their chaplains from the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal left the Dubuque Archdiocese May 27 for the Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa, where they experienced Eucharistic adoration and Mass at St. Ambrose Cathedral.

They then drove across southwest Iowa and into the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, where they stopped at St. Monica Catholic Church in Kansas City for a Holy Hour and ended their day at Camp Kateri Tekakwitha in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.

The pilgrims are spending May 28-30 in the Diocese of Wichita before visiting Oklahoma’s Diocese of Tulsa May 30-31 and the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City May 31-June 3.

The National Eucharistic Congress Inc., which organized the pilgrimage, estimates that at least 7,000 people joined 2025 National Eucharistic Pilgrimage events in its first week.

The pilgrimage builds on the momentum of last year’s inaugural National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, where 30 perpetual pilgrims on four, two-month routes converged in Indianapolis ahead of the National Eucharistic Congress in July. The pilgrimage and congress are part of the National Eucharistic Revival, a three-year initiative of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that began in 2022.

Speaking to media May 28, Johnson said that she has felt especially blessed by the conversations she has had with people during the processions, including those who had not planned to join them but were curious about the events. Other pilgrims commented on the meaningfulness of spontaneously praying with others, receiving prayer intentions or seeing their priest-chaplains hearing confessions along the way.

Although the pilgrims’ schedule frequently includes Eucharistic adoration at churches, they also expose Jesus in the monstrance in their van for prayer. Frances Webber, a perpetual pilgrim and student who lives in Minnesota, described the morning of May 28, where the pilgrims drove through “the cow fields of rural Kansas” in Eucharistic adoration.

“I was just sitting there with my coffee, telling him (Jesus) about my life and what was happening right now and where I was at,” she said. “And I was just struck by the simplicity of that moment, and the way the Lord was just right there — like he was my friend and we were having coffee together.”

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