Heritage Talk: Eucharist and the Missionary Cenacle

Easter Sunday 2024 marked the centennial anniversary of the celebration of the first Public Mass held inside the National Shrine. The celebration of the inauguration of the liturgical life of this grand and noble votive church in honor of Mary, the Immaculate Conception, will be celebrated throughout 2024 and 2025.

Father Gary Banks, S.T., Archivist of the Missionaries of the Holy Trinity, will offer a talk entitled “Eucharist and the Missionary Cenacle.” We invite you to join us in the Crypt Church following the 5:15 p.m. Mass on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

Following the event, the presentation will be made available for viewing on the National Shrine’s Website and YouTube Channel.

More About the Speaker:

Reverend Gary Banks is a Missionary Servant of the Most Holy Trinity (ST). He was born in New York City and received his seminary training in Washington, D.C. After ordination, Father Gary served a rural route in the priestess South, in middle Georgia. He was then assigned to missionary work in Puerto Rico and Mexico. Upon his return to the United States, Father Gary became pastor of an inner-city parish in Los Angeles and associate professor in the Los Angeles and Tijuana Seminaries, where he helped found the Catechetical Pastoral School for Spanish speakers. His last missionary tour found him back in the rural south, serving the immigrant communities.

In addition to his seminary studies, Reverend Banks holds a degree from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, with studies at Sankt Georgen Hochschule, Frankfurt, Germany, l’Institute Catholique of Paris, the Hebrew University of Mount Scopus, Israel, and l’École Biblique of Jerusalem. Father Gary currently serves as an archivist for his congregation and as a researcher for Dr. William L. Portier, the well-known Catholic historian. You can view the 4th talk of this series, “Eucharist and Dorothy Day,” delivered by Dr. Portier on July 20, 2024, on our blog.

More About the Talk:

This presentation, the twelfth in our Heritage Series, celebrating the “100 Years of Worship” at the National Shrine, tells of an American religious movement that converged with the vision and theology of Bishop Shahan and his construction of this National Shrine.

Father Thomas A. Judge, CM, was the founder of a lay apostolic movement that generated two North American religious congregations: the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity for women (1918) and the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity for men (1921). Interestingly, on September 23, 1920, Father Judge came to visit the sisters and ended up at the Foundation Stone Ceremony of the National Shrine. Closely following the teachings of Pope Pius X on Eucharist and Holy Communion, Father Judge saw the Eucharist as true energizing food, “the greater eating of His Body, the greater drinking of His Blood, so that we never tire of doing good for others.”

In 1926, Father Judge moved his major seminary to Catholic University where it was both the admiration and the scandal of the seminary world – a supposed “religious” house with no priest in charge, and hearty brothers and sisters, accompanied by their chickens and roosters! Without a chaplain, the men and women lived their Eucharistic life between the Crypt Church and the university. Their apostolic spirit readily united them with persons such as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Monsignor Paul Hanley Furfey, “the unofficial systematic theologian of the Catholic Worker movement,” Professor Mary Elizabeth Walsh, who began her career as a research assistant to Furfey, and many other leaders of the Catholic Social movement of the 1920s and 1930s.  Most of the priests of this early religious congregation received both minor and major orders in the Crypt Church of the National Shrine. James J. Norris, the personal secretary to Father Judge during those nascent years, had his roots in the Cenacle movement. He became an international Catholic lay leader and a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Shrine.

Father Thomas A. Judge, CM is remembered in a stained-glass window in the Upper Sacristy, honoring his contribution to the growth and spread of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.