By Reagan Scott
for the Register
Last weekend, the Newman Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln held a “40 Hours Devotion” to celebrate the feast of its patron saint, Thomas Aquinas.
The devotion, which involves the exposition of the Eucharist in the monstrance for 40 hours, began with an opening Mass at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 26, and culminated with 10 a.m. Mass celebrated by Bishop James Conley on Sunday, Jan. 28.
In addition to Mass and adoration, the weekend included talks given by Father Kevin Dyer, S.J., a holy hour for unity among Christians on Saturday afternoon, dinner hosted by the Knights of Columbus on Friday night, and a brunch after Mass Sunday morning.
This is the second year the Newman Center has held a 40 hours devotion to start the spring semester and celebrate the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. While the devotion had been a tradition at the Newman Center in the past, it was Father Alec Sasse, the assistant pastor for the Newman Center, who brought it back last year.
Father Sasse said he had fond memories of celebrating 40 hours at St. Peter Parish in Lincoln growing up, and fostered a love for the devotion in his time at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, since it was in Philadelphia that St. John Neumann brought the devotion to the United States.
“I noticed that each year, the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas ‘snuck up’ on us at the Newman Center, and we were looking to teach the students how to celebrate the saints in a more intentional way,” Father Sasse said. “We decided to try it last year to try to accomplish three things: greater devotion to the Eucharist, greater knowledge and love of St. Thomas Aquinas, and greater sense of community in our parish. The students last year expressed how much they loved it.”
Victoria Fassett, the campus minister for the Newman Center, echoed the students’ enjoyment of the devotion last year, and said they were excited to hold it again to remind the students that Jesus is the most important part of their semester. She also said it has been a good way to begin adoration for the semester, which is held Monday through Friday.
“[The students] have a deep love for Jesus in the Eucharist, so that’s been really beautiful to watch, and it was a really great way to kick off the semester,” Fassett said. “I think it gave them the chance to consider what they wanted this year to look like.”
Students had the opportunity to come and go throughout the weekend, and Father Sasse said one group of students completed an 11-hour vigil, praying a Divine Mercy Chaplet at the beginning of each hour.
The holy hour for Christian Unity on Saturday afternoon was led by Max Chapman, who served as a FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) missionary at UNL for seven years. Chapman is the founder of More Mercy, an apostolate with a mission to “Restore Christian unity through Truth and Love.”
“We dedicated the holy hour to praying for Christian unity and invited campus ministry leaders and their students from other Christian denominations to join us… The hope was to pray for repentance, conversion and new beginnings in the movement towards unity,” Chapman said.
Participants received guides to direct their prayer during the hour, which included reflection topics and questions that attendees could meditate on related to the topics of repentance, convention and new beginnings.
As the speaker for the weekend, Father Dyer preached at each of the Masses, including one held on Saturday morning, and gave an evening talk on Friday and Saturday.
Father Sasse said Father Dyer has been a friend of the Newman Center for a couple of years. The senior chaplain for FOCUS, Father Dyer spent more than a month at the Newman Center last summer when FOCUS held its new staff training in Lincoln.
“He is a dynamic preacher and has a great love for the saints, so he made a perfect choice,” Father Sasse said.
Since the theme for the devotion was St. Thomas Aquinas and the Eucharist, each of Father Dyer’s talks and homilies echoed these themes. The focus of his talk Friday night was memory and charity, and Saturday night’s talk centered on the Eucharist and the Incarnation.
Across the talks, around 200 students attended, “which is pretty impressive when you consider that 200 college students came to church on a Friday and Saturday night!” Father Sasse said.
In his Saturday night talk, Father Dyer told the students that while St. Thomas Aquinas fought against Eucharistic heresies, and heresies like Gnosticism and Albigensianism, which touted the idea that “this world around us is not to be considered as a good creation of God,” the heretical ideas are still prevalent and destructive today, even if they exist in different forms.
Father Dyer said, “Doesn’t our world tell us, at every turn, that the only way out is to form some kind of palace in your mind and leave creation behind? Jesus’s message is the opposite, and he lived it. He chose the messiness of this world.”
Father Dyer said St. Thomas Aquinas would ponder the Eucharist, and its significance, that Jesus would leave the Church with this sacrament.
“Food must enter into the body. Food remains united with you, it gets incorporated into you and this is precisely why the Eucharist makes so much sense,” Father Dyer said. “Because if God chose to touch the world with his two hands, how much more sense does it make that he would want to become our food, to enter into us and to even become a part of us?
“God wants to live in communion with us. This is what happens each time we receive the Eucharist.”
Father Dyer told those present that the most revolutionary thing one can do in the culture today is to celebrate the Lord’s day, to be in communion with God by receiving the Eucharist, and to be in communion with one another.
“God created this day not just so we can rest our bodies, but so that we can enjoy the highest things in life. Learn how to live life together,” he told the students. “People are so starved for true friendship.”
Father Dyer said that ultimately, the gift of the Eucharist reaffirms the fact that while the world is chaotic, and messy and broken, it is still good, because it was created by God.
“If God did not love this world, and did not have recourse for it, he would not have come down and united himself to it. And he would not give us the body and blood of his son, to enter into us, to become a part of us, if he did not think this life was worth living,” Father Dyer said.
Father Ryan Kaup, the pastor for the Newman Center, encouraged the students at Father Dyer’s talk to continue to celebrate the community, the challenges and the joy that living life together brings, and to invite people into it. He said that the goal of spending 40 hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament as a community was to foster a greater devotion to our Lord in the Eucharist.
“That is our desire for our Newman community: that all on campus may come to know and love Jesus in the Eucharist,” he said.
SNR photos | Natalie Bender
